Hope did not respond but took a further step, stretching out her hand and placing it on the buck’s taut neck. She held it there with a quality of presence and compassion that Francis was surprised to see in a woman who he had tried to dismiss as a selfish opportunist. The deer moved its eyes, released from the fixity of relentless stress, and looked towards her, starting to breathe like a runner after a race, as if it knew that something was finished and that it could afford to rest. Without turning around, Hope reached back with her free arm and squeezed her hand twice in the air. As quietly as possible, Francis stepped forward and handed her the wire cutters. She turned parallel to the stag, leaning her body against it and continuing to soothe it with her voice while she cut the wires one by one. She left a single filament attached to the fence until she had unwound the metal tangled around its antlers and then, with one last cut, she released the buck entirely. It was by now so calm that it took a while to realise it was free. Hope gave it one last stroke along its back and then stepped gracefully away.

‘You can go now,’ she said.

Soon after she spoke, the buck turned abruptly, bobbed over a fallen branch and then, seeing an open path through the trees, put on a short burst of speed before pausing to look back at them. After this moment of connection, it set off again, cantering towards the open ground with its head held high.

‘That was amazing,’ said Francis.

‘Do you still want to argue?’ asked Hope, with a smile that made a perfect parenthesis for her lips, as if she had almost forgotten to mention how lovely they were.

‘Maybe,’ said Francis tenaciously. Now that the buck was free, he was free to be appalled that Hope had burst out of his guilty imagination and into his life, like a grand piano, whose faint music he had been overhearing from the flat above, crashing through the ceiling and landing at his feet.

‘Maybe has a “maybe not” hidden inside it,’ said Hope.

‘Does it?’ said Francis, kissing her lightly on the lips.

She pulled him forward and they started to kiss with more conviction.

‘So,’ said Francis, when they broke off, ‘how come you’re here? I still haven’t recovered from our last encounter.’

‘What’s taking you so long,’ said Hope, ‘regret that we didn’t make love?’

‘I regret that we didn’t; I would have regretted it if we had and, as it is, I regret that we came so close.’

‘You’re really into regret.’