The bar was all but empty, just two tourists chattering in Italian and scrolling their phones and, by the fire, Luca and Pax curled up on an oversized oxblood chesterfield that clashed beautifully with her hair. Knees drawn up, she asked every few sentences if Luca really wanted to hear this because it was terribly dull.

‘Yes I do. Stop asking that.’

She told him reluctantly, her voice lower than ever. And as she spoke, Luca learned a history to Pax he’d never imagined, one that started to make sense of the secrecy and need for control, the desperation to appease. Having dropped out of school at seventeen to join her brother in London, she’d holed up in his student digs, initially acting as a glorified housekeeper, but soon falling in with a party set that eclipsed his student crowd: the club DJs and Chelsea-toff drug-pushers, trustafarians and art students.

Boyfriends had been easy to come by. ‘The hair did all the work,’ she explained self-effacingly, ‘especially with arty types who get off on the Pre-Raphaelite thing. The quieter I was, the better; it just added to my brooding muse. And I was quiet. I was just heartbroken. I thought I’d never be happy again, which made me the perfect artist’s companion. We’d sink bottles of tequila and absinthe, fantasising we were latter-day bohemians. I took any tab or toke I was offered because it helped me forget Bay.’

He watched her lips move as she explained that her brother’s crowd soon seemed too square and rah, so she’d moved out, landing in a squat with a boyfriend who sold vintage records. Luca adored the way her mouth curled when she spoke, the open-heartedness with which she couldn’t help speaking.

‘It was full of musicians and street artists and performance poets, lovely people.’ Her eyes warmed up at the memory. ‘I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was a mess underneath, and there were a lot of drugs. We were raided regularly. Granny and Grumps had no idea, thank God. I couldn’t hold down work or a relationship longer than a few weeks. Then a distant cousin got me a job temping at a swanky architecture firm. Mack was the in-house structural engineer there.’

She’d pulled the hair back from her face and was twisting it tightly into the crook of her neck, her fingers white-knuckled.

‘I’d caught my boyfriend in bed with someone else, things were really awkward at the squat. The architect’s office had a shower and even a gym. One day after work, I hid in the ladies until everyone had gone home and then slept on the sofa in the directors’ suite. I felt safe and warm for the first time in months, so I did it again the next night, and all that week.

‘Mack rumbled me when he stayed late after work one evening. He could have had me fired on the spot, but instead he took me under his wing. He explained that his marriage was breaking up, so he understood what it felt like to be a bit lonely and lost. He invited me to be his lodger, rent-free. This bit’s quite boring – shall I skip past it?’