I stared at the picture until I couldn’t stand it any more, then scrolled down to the comments just to get it off the screen.

Jo Knightley

Great days xxx

29 March

Martin Coffey

Had forgotten about this! How young do u look Beth Delaney?

29 March

Ian Howard

Love this. Remember when Charlotte Lowe cracked up on stage when she was supposed to be dying? x

29 March

Charlotte Lowe

Least I didn’t forget my lines Ian Howard!

29 March

Claire Grimble

Nice hair Mark Ruddington xx

29 March

Mark Ruddington

The after-show party sticks in my memory for some reason Melissa Lynch ;-)

29 March

Tim Darcy

Just wish I could remember what play we did . . .

29 March

Nick Pearson-Wood

Shakespeare?

29 March

Chris Billingham

I’m thinking The Tempest???

29 March

Rob Krause

Unless I’m much mistaken it was the Scottish play . . .

30 March

Vicky Mee

Eh? Braveheart?

30 March

Rob Krause

Macbeth!

30 March

Vicky Mee

Lol. Why’s that called the Scottish play?

30 March

And so it went on, more than fifty comments and eighty likes on that post alone. Clearly it stirred a lot of happy memories among Mel’s friendship group on Facebook, or at least those members who’d been at school with her. The cryptic comment about the after-show party was intriguing. Mel had not responded to it, which was a bit weird – she’d shared the link to the pictures, but not responded to a comment directed at her. The guy who’d posted the gallery in the first place – Mark Ruddington – was not a name that was familiar.

I tapped on his profile picture to take a closer look at him, then double-tapped on the school picture to zoom in on the smiling group of young actors. I was ninety-five per cent sure that the black-clad teenager with his arm around Mel was Mark Ruddington: he had aged pretty well considering there were two decades between this school snap and his Facebook profile picture, surfboard and all. There was a certain facial similarity between him and Ben. Both dark-haired, both about the same height, same build. I remembered again the drunken game of ‘stand up if you’ve ever’ and Mel’s single infidelity – which she’d said was at school and therefore didn’t count.

Perhaps Mark Ruddington had been her first infidelity. That first time she had been unfaithful. She had never told me who at the time – she had just pulled me close and given me a drunken kiss – but the more I thought about it, the more there seemed to be a kind of weird logic to it, a parallel. That she had cheated twice in her life, twenty years apart, with men who bore an uncanny resemblance to each other. First this Mark Ruddington guy, then Ben. Maybe that was just the type she went for, when she got bored.

The after-show party sticks in my memory for some reason, Melanie Lynch ;-)