He seems pleased that she likes it. The way he says ‘home town’ makes him seem exiled. She’s not that familiar with Spain, but she imagines him with a straw hat on, tall crystal glasses and a summer lunch laid out among the vines.

‘We’ll have a good view of the fireworks on the beach from here.’

‘Fireworks? I thought it was lockdown?’

‘There’ll be fireworks,’ he says. ‘There always are by the sea. It’ll be fun.’

They both sit and, with the candlelight and the music, it feels very European – like she could be on holiday. Except for the temperature. She lets the bubbles fizz over her tongue. Trent is a snob about champagne. She has a momentary panic that Trent might have forgotten to get the bottles from the boxes in the garage at home to chill them in the wine fridge. But then she remembers. She’s not going to be drinking Perrier-Jouët with him. Helen is. She hopes she chokes on it.

‘So where is home?’ she asks Matteo. He describes a hilltop town inland from Barcelona and his troubles getting back there in lockdown. He tells her about how he met his ex, Shauna, when she was on holiday in Barcelona and he had a student job as a city tour guide.

‘I followed her to England.’ He smiles bashfully at how romantic he’d been. ‘I wanted to transfer my studies to carry on studying to be a teacher.’

‘You wanted to be a teacher?’

‘I still do. But I had to get a job. I had to be a grown-up.’

It’s funny how far people go, then get scuppered by events, she thinks. When Jamie was young, she thought that if she gave him the best education, she’d propel him into his future, with enough backing and momentum to carry him to the stars. But it didn’t happen that way.

‘One day, I still dream I’ll build my own house on the patch of land at the edge of my village. It’s got a view of the mountains to die for.’

‘It sounds lovely,’ she says. ‘And Shauna?’

‘We weren’t as compatible as we thought,’ he said. ‘The lockdown proved that we are just too different. I loved her – and in a way I still do – but we wound each other up too much. Being together twenty-four-seven was the making of some people, but it broke us.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugs. ‘It was a scary time. She was very, very anxious about Covid. Debilitatingly so.’

‘You won’t get back together?’ she asks.

‘No. No,’ he says and shrugs sadly. ‘No. It’s finished.’

Maddy wonders if the girl, Shauna, regrets letting him go.

‘What about you, Maddy?’ he asks. She likes the way he says her name. She likes the way he looks at her. As if he’s genuinely interested. She realises that she can’t remember the last time Trent has looked at her with anything other than defensiveness, or disinterest.

She fiddles with the stem of the glass. ‘Oh, you don’t want to know. It’s a long story.’