Tamsin half-jogged the rest of the way to the train station, where she found, to her delight, that she was just in time to catch the delayed 15.22 train: she would be at Denham Hall by 6 p.m. She wasn’t sure exactly when Callum would finish teaching, but she was more than happy to stand and wait for as long as it took him to appear. Halfway between Solihull and Warwick, she had another brilliant idea – to book a B&B in Denham, and take Callum out for the night. There wasn’t enough signal on her phone to search the Internet for places to stay, so she called her mother and asked her to find one for her. Roz was bemused but compliant, ringing back five minutes later to say that she’d booked them into a nearby boutique hotel with gardens landscaped by Capability Brown, her treat, they should go ahead and enjoy themselves.

Tamsin arrived at the school just as the last carloads of children were leaving after the end of normal lessons. She stationed herself under a large beech tree outside the main entrance. It was the first time she had been to Denham Hall. Behind her was a large, tree-studded lawn. At its fringes, little wooden signposts asked people to ‘please keep off the grass’ in tasteful gold letters. It was the sort of ostentatious luxury that would usually have riled Tamsin, but right now, standing under the beech tree with its new leaves still only half-unfurled and the first hint of dew sending up those mysterious evening smells, she could understand why Callum liked working here. She would tell him that when she saw him, she thought, resolving to be much more tolerant of their differences. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Callum’s face when he came out and saw her standing there. Tamsin fell into a deep reverie of contentedness, imagining all the things she would say to him.

The heavy whirr of some bird taking off in the bushes behind her startled Tamsin out of her daydream. She glanced up and noticed a boy slipping out of a side door in the main school building. As she watched, he ambled across the front of the school towards a lower, more modern building with a blue door marked ‘Boys’. He was taking his time, stopping to do a lazy leapfrog – more of a leg-over – on every one of the little concrete parking bollards he came to. When he stopped to tie his shoelace on the fourth bollard, Tamsin hurried over to him, hoping to find out what time the class would end.

‘Excuse me?’

The boy looked up at her from a racing-start position over his shoelace. He was twelve or thirteen years old and already very good-looking, with slightly slanting hazel eyes and the most gorgeous rust-coloured hair.