‘Must be the company.’ Harry held her gaze. ‘I love it too. It’s a shame I can’t be here all the time.’ He had recently put an offer in on a property near St Albans where his wife and children were now living.

‘You can always come back some day,’ she said, concerned to see the sadness in his expression. She couldn’t believe that this handsome, intelligent, sensitive man could be hers.

‘You can never really go back, can you?’ He looked out over the sea.

She watched him for a moment intrigued by his words and the deepening sadness in his eyes. ‘What have you seen?’ she asked.

‘Huh? Sorry, I was just admiring the view.’

‘But what have you seen? What have you had to … see?’

‘You don’t want to hear those stories.’

‘Why not? ’

‘Because … there are some things you shouldn’t have to know.’ He turned to her. ‘I had a friend at university. He went on to be a copper on one of those graduate schemes. He was doing really well but then quit out of the blue, retrained as a web designer. And you know what he said when I asked him about it?’ He waited for her to shake her head. ‘He said, “You know what, Harry, every day I had to pick up a rock and look at all the bugs living underneath while the rest of the world walked past, oblivious. Nothing I did ever reduced the number of bugs and it got to the point where I just wanted to put the rock down and walk by like everyone else.”’

Karene leaned across the table and took Harry’s hand. ‘I get what you’re saying. But I want to know the good and the bad.’

‘So let’s start with the good, yeah?’

‘Have you ever talked about it with anyone?’

Harry hung his head with a laugh then looked her way. ‘Yes, Miss Psychologist. I have, thank you. The Navy is fairly good at dealing with these things; we’ve been doing it a while.’

‘I’ll have to take your word for that.’

‘Look, I saw a lot in Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s not nice, but it’s war so you can kind of compartmentalize it. The hardest stuff to deal with is what people do to each other outside of a war zone.’

‘Which is why your policeman friend found it so hard.’

Harry raised his eyebrows.

‘What? You think I don’t get this stuff?’

He gazed out at the ocean again. ‘The hardest memories to shift are the children struggling to survive because they were born in the wrong place or because they belong to the wrong religion.’

Karene squeezed his hand. ‘Tough childhoods can grow tough kids though. I should know.’

Harry looked at her. She couldn’t read his expression. Whatever it was, he shook it away and stood up. ‘More fizz?’