‘Let’s go and get the cake,’ Adrian said with an exasperated sigh. ‘Come on.’

The two of them traipsed off into the house, Adrian slightly taller, his father slightly broader, but both of them cut from exactly the same cloth.

‘I know he won’t thank me for saying it but he’s so like his dad,’ John said as they disappeared into the house.

‘He won’t but he is,’ I agreed. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

He leaned over the bar, arms resting in between a bevy of bottles. ‘And you won’t thank me for asking this but who did you text when you weren’t supposed to?’

I cast a glance over my shoulder, one eyebrow raised.

‘Bartender’s privilege,’ he said with a lopsided grin. ‘I’m entitled to ask about any and all gossip I hear during a shift and duty-bound never to repeat a word.’

It was a new one on me.

‘There’s an oath, is there?’ I asked, smiling.

‘I’m practically a doctor,’ he confirmed.

‘Or a lawyer,’ I suggested. ‘Or a priest.’

He paused and looked up at me, meeting my eyes just for a moment.

‘Maybe not a priest.’

I sipped my cocktail and tried not to think about what I’d seen in the gents toilets.

‘All right, let me guess, I’m good at this,’ John said as he pulled out a small knife to peel back the foil on another bottle of prosecco. ‘It’s an ex, clearly.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I didn’t hear all of it but I heard enough.’ John began mixing more drinks while he talked. ‘What’s interesting to me is that your friends clearly don’t think you should text him. Also, you told Sumi but not Adrian and you know those three, they tell each other everything.’

I fought off an indignant flush of outrage. They weren’t ‘those three’, we were ‘us four’. How dare this random bar boy group my friends into a trio when we were definitely, absolutely, always-had-been-always-would-be, a quartet?

‘Fine, it’s an ex,’ I admitted, tightening my ponytail. ‘But that was obvious, you’re not exactly psychic, are you?’

He smiled mildly as he poured what looked like a never-ending stream of gin into a cocktail shaker.

‘What’s the deal?’ John asked. ‘How come they don’t want you talking to him?’

‘We broke up when I moved to America for work,’ I told him, reluctant to go over the details of one of the worst times of my life with a man I knew nothing about other than that he worked in a bar, mixed a mean cocktail and was circumcised.

‘Bad break-up?’

‘Complicated break-up.’

‘He didn’t want you to go?’