There was no one else around, no sound coming from the next room. Mum and Mark were probably both asleep. Anyway, it was a risk worth taking.

I marched along the corridor as if I knew exactly where I was going, and headed straight for the hotel bar.

It was quieter than before, but it had been Saturday night then and it was Monday now. An entirely different proposition. The people in there seemed mainly old, and were talking quietly or not at all. There was no music, and as I walked in no heads turned my way.

Maybe the barman wouldn’t serve me. And what if they told Mum and Mark – my parents – that I’d been there?

But it couldn’t be a crime just to go in. It wasn’t even that late.

I’d just ask for a lemonade and drink it, and then go back to bed.

There was someone sitting at the bar already, a vaguely familiar someone with his big back turned towards me. Part of me flinched from the idea of going over there to stand next to a lone man, but I carried on regardless.

And then I recognised him. It was the piano player from our first night there. I recognised the barman, too; it was the waiter who’d served us dinner the first night.

I asked for a lemonade in my best French. I had just enough money to pay for it. And then – to be polite, to make conversation, because I was lonely – I said, in French, to the man sitting next to me, ‘You’re not playing the piano tonight?’

He inclined his head and looked me up and down.

‘I don’t do that every night. It’s a hobby, really,’ he said in English. ‘I do it as a favour to the manager as much as anything else. Also, it’s a very good piano.’

‘You’re English,’ I said stupidly.

‘So are you.’

That seemed to make what I was doing safer. In that environment, it was virtually like bumping into a neighbour. I settled onto the bar stool next to him, because why not? Who else was I going to talk to?

The barman tactfully withdrew to the other side of the bar and started discreetly polishing glasses. I said, ‘So where are you from?’

‘London, mostly. I have a flat there, but I move around. I have a job selling holiday apartments, here and in other places. You?’

‘Oh… We live near London. For now. But my parents have decided to move.’

My parents. Not a phrase I’d ever had much use for. I didn’t really talk about my family, with Molly or Jasmine or anybody else.

But at one time, if I had decided to open up a little, I might have said something like: My parents are divorced, I don’t see my dad very often…

And now my parents meant something else, and so did my dad. It meant Mark taking over, basically. His sudden and enormous power over all our lives.