Liz was tall and lean – Robin heard later that she’d played squash for the Leeds university team – with thick brunette hair that had slowly undone itself from some sort of up-do over the course of the day. She might have been sweating like crazy but she had on a funky patterned dress that wouldn’t have shown it if she was. She looked good but in a realistic way, not tarty or over-made-up, nor the opposite and annoyingly natural. Robin couldn’t even console herself that she was thick: she was going to be a lawyer, Corinna had reluctantly told her; she’d just finished a CPE.

‘I don’t know what to say, Rob,’ she’d said when she was back from her honeymoon. ‘I want to tell you she’s vile – I want to hate her for you, I do hate her for you. But she isn’t vile. If she wasn’t going out with him, you’d like her. She’s … all right.’ She must have been: the following summer, he’d married her.

Corinna’s wedding was when she’d finally realized it was over. Done. Through everything that had happened, even having Lennie, some part of her believed that what they’d had, that level of connection and engagement – sympathy, actually, in the literal sense of feeling things in the same way – was too strong just to cease to exist. She’d allowed herself to believe, at least on some level, that there must have been something else at work, that something had happened to Samir which for some profound reason, he hadn’t been able to tell her. That day, she’d understood – at last – that that final sustaining scrap of comfort was false. A lie. She’d been kidding herself: there’d been nothing profound about it; she’d just been wrong.

When he’d broken up with her, she’d been devastated. She’d been open with him, unguarded in a way that she’d only ever been with Corinna, before or since. She’d let herself be vulnerable because she’d trusted him and he’d turned round and thrown it in her face.

That had been bad enough but what troubled her even more – the secondary gift – was that her judgement had been so off. If she’d been wrong about that, what else was she wrong about? It had taken a long time, years actually, to come back from that. Rin might say she never had.

‘I’m sorry. That was really stupid – I don’t know why I said it. I’m exhausted, I’m frustrated, I …’

‘We should go, anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s late. How are you getting home?’

‘Cab.’ Emphatic. Highly unlikely he’d offer her a lift, especially after that, but just in case. The idea of being stuck in a car with him.

On the other side of the doors, she stopped. ‘I’m going this way.’