‘Then don’t.’ Luca had disliked the man on instinct, and what he’d witnessed hadn’t looked like much of an apology. ‘Tell him to jump off a cliff.’

Her eyes sharpened, surprised. ‘Not many cliffs round here.’

‘Offer to drive him to one. Just not today,’ he added quickly. ‘Not until you’ve had the strong coffee I’m about to make you, and something to eat. You look like you never eat.’

‘That’s what Bay said.’ The hall clock chimed a quarter. Her face resumed its panicked look. ‘Jesus, I am so late! I’ve phoned the Head twice with a lie about a flat tyre. Christ!’ She turned to the front door then spun back again. ‘Sorry. Blasphemy. Oh God, and I’m being so ungrateful as well. You’re a kind man, Luca, even if you’re only doing this for my mother’s sake, and to avoid teaching pony lessons.’ She’d overhead Ronnie say it, he realised in horror. ‘It was very noble to say that you’ve been where I am, even if we both know it’s not true.’

Luca stiffened. He could smell the alcohol again. He took in the compass points of her face, from high cheeks to dimpled chin to furrowed forehead, her mother’s beauty dusted with fiery cayenne and soured by too many twists of melancholy.

‘The night I arrived here,’ he told her, ‘I’d downed one whisky after another on a seven-hour flight from Toronto then chucked it all up at Schiphol. The six months before that, I’d barely been sober. If I’d walked into that hotel an hour earlier, I’d probably have got drunk with you. I owe you my sobriety right now. You are where I was – and seeing it close up is what’s stopping me going there again. I can’t watch you do it again either.’

The amber eyes scorched afresh. ‘I’m not doing it again.’

A looped slideshow played too fast in Luca’s head whenever he remembered that night: her kissing a stranger, throwing up, wet skin, her total raw despair, his own need to comfort.

‘I’m not doing any of it again, Luca,’ she repeated carefully, letting herself out.

The cold wind caught her unawares. Gasping, she lurched off the step.

He followed, sprinting past to put himself between her and the car. ‘Let me help you, Pax.’

‘Cut out the therapishtact.’ She stopped, aware that she’d just slurred. She held up her hands. ‘My teeth are chattering, okay?’

‘Let’s go to AA. Or you can talk to an addiction counsellor. If you won’t talk to me, talk to someone else.’

‘I told you, I’m fine!’ She tried to push past him, stumbling as the puppy threaded in front of her, losing her balance and flailing to avoid stepping on him, a strange high-stepping dance that pitched her into the cobbles.

Luca caught her before she hit her head, shocked by how much she was shaking, toxic with adrenaline. He steadied her for a moment as they crouched by her car, then she shrugged him away with a muttered ‘thanks’, pressing her forehead to the polished metal door, mortified.