They walk slowly along the wide street that’s been cordoned off until 8 a.m. for filming, a camerawoman capturing it all as a man in a puffer jacket walks slowly backwards, pulling her along a train track that means she can keep them smoothly in frame as they move. Everyone is under strict instructions to work fast and use as few takes as possible, because there just isn’t the time. Three weeks is a tight shoot, she’s been told, and they’ve got a mountain of restrictions around filming times and locations because of the time of year. Southern Germany wants the movie made here, but not at the cost of annoying their tourists.

The actors pause in front of a small shop window.

‘You see that ring there?’ ‘George’ asks ‘Hermione’, and Evie holds her breath as he does. She wrote these words. It’s crazy. ‘She had one just like it. I wish you could have known her, Herm. I really do. My dad gave it to her after he came back. These little things that remind us – they’re everywhere, aren’t they?’

It’s Daphne’s turn to speak. ‘George,’ she says, and her voice is different than it is in real life. Evie doesn’t know why that surprises her, but it does. ‘Your capacity to romanticise the past astounds me. It’s what makes me love you like I do. But can’t you look forward, too? Because the past is over with, and I’m stood right here asking you to think of a future.’

Evie winces at the sentimentality. Those words haunt her, because she spoke them herself, once; the last nail in the coffin of a thing called hope. Back in her twenties her ex, Bobby, had truly broken her heart, but he was one in a long line of heartbreaks, starting with the moment that as a fifteen-year-old teenager she watched her dad pull out of the drive with two suitcases and his raging temper. Having him in the house had been hell, in many ways, because he seemed to resent that although he was Donald Gilbert, famous screenwriter and director, out there in the world, in the house he was just dad. It was like Evie and her mom weren’t enough for him, like he needed to not only be loved but revered. So he left, ran into the arms of one of his actresses, then left her for another one.

The only time Evie has seen him since is in the occasional arts section magazine feature. Every other man she’s tried to love since then has done the exact same thing. They always do, Evie understands. It’s just a case of when.