‘Are you sure? I feel like a shit, I feel – if Will weren’t best man I’d tell him to bugger off, but it’s a bit late in the game—’

Callum stood up. ‘It’s fine. Give my very best to Bex. I hope it’s a wonderful day for both of you.’

He managed to get himself home. He called the super at the building site to inform him that he wouldn’t be coming back to work. Then he sat down on the sofa and stayed there for three whole weeks.

During all that time Leah shopped, cleaned and cooked for him, in near silence, asking no questions. He discovered that she had an extraordinary talent for cooking rich food: huge fried breakfasts and creamy soups, macaroni cheese and chocolate mousses. Callum ate himself right out of fitness, taking a melancholy pleasure in the softening of his thighs, the spreading at his waist.

* * *

Callum had had no contact with Tamsin since her sign-off email, so he didn’t know she was living in Balham with her old schoolfriends Lottie and Fran, or that she had been miserable since the night she had slept with Will.

And he didn’t know that she knew, or half-knew, why he had left his job, and that this was why she had sent such a cursory sign-off email. The fear of having her fears confirmed made it impossible for Tamsin to talk to him. If the truth was what she thought it was, she didn’t want to hear it.

She felt as if she’d been caught in the vicinity of an enormous explosion: a blast that left her apparently unharmed, yet suffering serious internal damage.

For several weeks, Tamsin spoke exclusively to Lottie and Fran. She went to work, came home, ate, watched bad television, went to sleep, got up and did it all over again, ignoring Chris’s calls, when they came, and Serena’s, and Roz’s, and Bertrand’s. Her family seemed to understand that she needed time, but Chris’s messages grew baffled, then hurt and eventually bitter. In his last message he accused her of leading him on. When she finally did call him, six weeks after her visit to Selly Oak, to say that she had sorted her life out and was ready to see him again, he told her very politely that he had fallen for one of the physios at Headley Court and that she was welcome to come and visit whenever she felt like it.

It was shortly after this blow that Will texted her, late one night – a shameless booty call, but one Tamsin felt too weak not to respond to. They fell into a queasy relationship, held together by guilt and reasonably good sex.

* * *