‘Let’s leave your mother out of this, shall we?’

‘The thing is, Luca,’ she leaned back against the door, scuffing a foot on the sisal mat, ‘my mother is right in the middle of it all. So is Bay, if you must know. He caused it, our rift.’

‘Go on.’

She was staring across at an old framed photograph, that blue flame heat back, and it spilled out in a quiet, rushed undertone. ‘Austen and Percy children always played together; we were like cousins. Mummy pushed off when I was tiny, so she was never much part of that. Bay was closer to my brother and sister at first; he’s five years older than me and I just remember him winning everything at Pony Club and being a menace at sleepovers. I was eleven when Daddy died, in a hell of hormones and grief. Bay was terribly sweet about it, coming here of his own volition and singling me out. He was about to take GCSEs, all floppy hair and loud waistcoats. Afterwards, I was sent away to boarding school and we wrote a few times, but we barely saw each other again until the summer he came back from university to learn the ropes as a gentleman farmer. By then, the curtain hair and waistcoats had gone and he was quite the best-looking man I’d ever seen. I was in my first year of A levels and competing for the stud every weekend. We really fell for each other. Three months in, I was hopelessly in love and Bay said it often enough for me to think he was too.’

Luca sensed the point coming, its romanticised prologue seeking to sweeten something soul-destroying.

‘Then Bay slept with my mother.’

Luca hadn’t seen that coming. She gave him a curiously apologetic smile.

‘Such a stupid phrase, isn’t it? Sleep didn’t come into it at all. I suppose I’ve always just thought of it like that because I was seventeen and wanted to wake up and find it was all a dream.’

‘That’s a hard betrayal to take.’

‘Isn’t it just?’ She threw up her palms, car keys jangling, playing it too lightly, soft laugh contradicting the pain in her eyes. ‘How do you forgive two people you love doing that to you?’

‘I don’t suppose you can.’

‘I certainly couldn’t at the time. It made no difference that they hadn’t met since he was tiny, that they pleaded a moment of mad mutual attraction, a no-names’ once-off. It’s all it takes, ultimately, isn’t it? You can wipe out everything in a night. One fuck. One night.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I left home. Life was a bit messy for a while. Fast forward fourteen years – a lot of which I’ve spent in a marriage which I realised very early on was the worst rebound ever – and Bay desperately wants to say sorry, which I know I should be grown-up about, in the same way I’ve tried to patch it up with Mummy – it’s ancient history, after all – but d’you know, I really don’t think I can forgive him.’