‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’

‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’

Milly let out a squeak.

Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.

Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’

‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.

‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’

‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’

‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’

‘What?’

‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who . . .’

‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’

I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should. I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.

‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’