I’d talked everything over with Sean before he took the girls out for dinner, and he’d promised me – promised me – he’d keep his mouth shut and behave himself. I should have known better. I should have known that his promises were worthless.

Mark had warned me, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it – I’d wanted to give Sean the benefit of the doubt. I’d said to Sean, If you want this all to work out, don’t rock the boat. Naturally he hadn’t been too happy about it, but that was Sean all over – always thinking about himself.

Mark had just said, Are you sure we can trust him? And I’d said, Yes. He’s kept quiet for years. He just has to keep quiet for a bit longer.

And then, after all that, Sean had got stupidly drunk. Mark had told me he’d let something slip. Some throwaway comment about Mark having come to find me once he’d got his freedom.

Sean had told Ava that Mark hadn’t been there when I needed him. Which was true. But she needed to know why, and that was what I was afraid to tell her. Because what if she couldn’t forgive me?

Anyway, I couldn’t think about all that now.

I examined my reflection in the mirror, turned sideways, struck a pose. Sex was all about confidence. That was the conclusion I’d come to since my long drought had ended. You couldn’t just tell yourself someone wanted you, or at least, I couldn’t. You had to feel that they wanted you. You had to believe it. So much of everything to do with love and sex was about having faith.

Time had been kinder to Mark than it had to me, at least in terms of appearance. I was in my thirties and I’d had two children, and I could hardly claim to look good from all angles. But he loved my stretch marks, my episiotomy scar. He really did.

And Sean never had. Given the choice between the old, unscarred, taut-bellied, smooth-skinned me – the one who’d never been pregnant – and the woman I was now, Sean would have chosen my younger self in a heartbeat.

Which I could understand, in a way. But that was the thing about youth – nobody got to keep it, not even the richest, best-preserved Hollywood stars. And when you did have it, you didn’t quite realise what you’d got – or I hadn’t, anyway. I hadn’t understood that it was a kind of power. I’d never tried to use it the way other women did, to get things that they might want later. Things they could keep.

Sharing a house with Ava, I was presented with a vision of youth and beauty day in, day out. Even if she was tired and fed up and had pimples in her hairline, Ava looked lit up. She was astonishing, really. Even when I’d been young, I’d never had that kind of beauty – the kind that stops people in the street.