Bridge felt the Saddle Bag bond of allegiance tighten in her sinews. ‘You saying I’m not a laydee?’

‘No, not that. It’s just they’re not like you.’

‘Underneath they are.’ She swiped her phone screen to unlock it. ‘They’re just like us, only…’ She faltered, perturbed by another I’m coming! accompanied by more aeroplane emojis and smiley tongue-out faces. Was he holding his own again? Where were the kids? His parents’ house in Poland had just four rooms with curtains for doors.

‘You okay, Bridge?’

‘Yes, I…’ She read a second message as it chimed through, Aleš declaring I have rogaliki and big boner, kochanie! Lots of tongues and doughnuts followed. ‘You know when your husband wants phone sex at the most inconvenient times?’ she murmured. ‘That.’ While it wasn’t the Anaconda of Orchard Close, it was out there.

‘Ash loves all that,’ Carly whispered, checking Ellis wasn’t listening. ‘Do you video call?’

‘All the fecking time.’ Overdoing the insouciance, Bridge switched her phone off. ‘Now that’s not something a laydee shares with her riding companions.’ She feigned an upper-class voice. It was intended to draw Carly in, but she took it too literally again.

‘Common as muck, me.’ Her sleepy Mexican eyes levelled on the photos on the mantel of Bridge on Craic. ‘Flynn says his posh totty are all sex maniacs.’

Eager to keep her sweet, Bridge almost found herself indiscreetly breaking the Bags’ golden confidentiality rule and mentioning the Safe Married Crush, ready to confess that hers had long been Flynn. Except suddenly it wasn’t, and that fact made her twitchy again. Having a crush on your new friend’s husband, however safe and married, was a killer. She had to get rid of it – fast.

Carly was telling her how Flynn’s love life had been complicated by his phone automatically saving all the naked selfies his girlfriend sent on WhatsApp. ‘Every time he tried to show a client an example of remedial farriery, they got an eyeful of Amelia’s snatch in her en-suite mirror.’ She’d gamely polished off almost all the biscuits, even crunching her way through the flint-hard almond ones, claiming they were delicious.

‘How do you stay so slim?’ Bridge asked enviously.

‘Not having a second car. Ash says we can’t afford one, but I reckon he won’t let me have one in case I start to sag and wobble.’

It was the prod Bridge needed. Looking down at her thighs on the sofa, each one wider than both Carly’s combined, she knew precisely how to burn off Fantasy Ash.

As soon as Carly was wheeling the buggy back to the estate, Bridge threw her kitbag in the car and drove to Broadbourne, calling in to give Craic a carrot on the way, safe in the knowledge that the real Ash wouldn’t be at the gym if he’d worked out there that morning.

Only he was still there, seventy kilos of brooding rock-hard testosterone, sweating on a pec deck, wolf eyes on her as soon as she walked in. She kept her gaze averted, avoiding the bench press and hammering twenty minutes on the treadmill with her earphones in, listening to defiant P!nk power anthems before retreating to the showers, aware that his eyes had stayed on her. At least, it felt as though they had. It still felt as though they were still on her in the shower.