Mum got out her phone and took photos, which bothered me – nobody else was doing it. And who was she going to say she was with? Was she going to tag Mark? However much her friends might hit the like button… what would they really think? Take her friend Karen, the divorcee with the dodgy ex-boyfriend who’d made a pass at her teenage daughter. Wouldn’t it be rubbing Karen’s nose in it?

Then I thought, Oh, who cares and got my phone out, too.

It wasn’t like I was going to put the pictures anywhere – I was a lurker, not a sharer. I never posted anything. I didn’t want people at school knowing things about me, not even something quite harmless like my mum dating someone new who’d taken us to a posh hotel for tea.

Mum was much less guarded than I was, but even so, she hadn’t yet put anything on Facebook about her hot new romance. I knew, because I kept an eye on her. These days she was forbidden to mention me unless I’d agreed, which I never did. But I liked to be sure.

Maybe she was worried about jinxing her new romance. Or maybe she and Mark had talked about this, and he wasn’t keen on being electronically introduced to a bunch of people he didn’t know.

Once I’d got his surname out of her – it was Walsh – I’d found his Facebook profile, which gave away the bare minimum and had a profile picture of a pair of feet in flippers. It was about as impersonal as you could get, a bit like mine, which was a picture of some rhubarb that I’d taken ages ago after Mum randomly brought it home one day. Apart from that, Mark barely seemed to exist online. All I’d found, buried among the stuff about all the other Mark Walshes, was a boring LinkedIn profile that wasn’t even public.

I put my phone away and Ellie and I tucked in. Mum didn’t eat all that much. Probably watching her figure. I wondered if she’d had sex with him yet. Almost certainly – why would you meet someone’s daughters unless you’d established that you had at least some kind of basic physical compatibility?

The thought was almost enough to put me off the patisserie. Sex was either embarrassing or disgusting, or both: it was putting condoms on dildos in personal, social and health education class, or the really dirty stuff you found out about as soon as you moved up into secondary school, the stuff it was hard to believe anybody would actually want to do. Sex was what the popular girls got up to – girls like Tasha Evans and Janette Crosby, sullen-faced and heavily made-up and awash with likes on social media. I couldn’t be bothered with all that. I couldn’t begin to see what might be in it for me.

I could see what might be in it for Mum, though, with Mark with the Jag and the bank balance, who could spend on an afternoon tea what we would have paid for food for a fortnight.