She watched him go, seeing the marks still on his back from his fall the other day.

The door closed definitively and quietly behind him. It was a fire door, to stop fires from spreading, and she felt the tiny spark of a truce that had glinted between them – a promise of a different way of communicating with one another – extinguish again.

*

‘What time do you call this?’ Her whisper in the dark was like a firework in the night sky.

‘Holy shit!’ Matty hissed, almost falling on the bed in shock. ‘You gave me a heart attack. I thought you were asleep!’

‘I was. You’re not as quiet as you think you are. Or perhaps you’re not as sober?’ Clover reached for the switch on the table lamp between their beds. Light bloomed like a midnight flower.

Matty grinned back at her. Her eyes were bright, a little mascara smudged around her eyes. ‘Whoops.’ A small hiccup escaped her too, proving the point.

‘Oh god,’ Clover groaned, unable not to grin back too. She’d seen that expression before. ‘You didn’t?’

‘No, no. I didn’t. I’m being really good,’ Matty said, tucking her legs up on the bed and settling in for a gossip. ‘But it was so hard.’

Clover hesitated. ‘Being good?’ she clarified.

Matty spluttered with laughter. She was clearly very drunk. She lay back on the pillows, her arms spread wide as she stared up at the ceiling. ‘God, he’s gorgeous.’ Her head turned to look at Clover. ‘Don’t you think he’s gorgeous?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it at all.’

Matty wrinkled her nose. ‘You don’t think anyone’s gorgeous. All you think about is work. You’re dead from the waist down.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I mean it! When was the last time you went on a date? 1982?’

‘I wasn’t even born in ’82, much less dating. And besides, I can’t date. I have a baby.’

‘Baby?’ Matty’s befuddled brain stalled. ‘Oh,’ she said disappointedly. ‘You mean Honest Box. You know, there is more to life than work.’

‘Is there, though?’ Clover tried to remember when exactly she had last gone on a date. Henry? That runner guy she’d met in the park? That had been . . . August? ‘Well, maybe once I’ve got an Oscar.’

Matty sighed, sticking one slim leg into the air and examining it. She was wearing navy tights with a little cream skirt. Clover sensed the look would have worked well in Salzburg.

‘So, how was it, anyway? What did you do all day if not that?’

‘Well,’ Matty smiled, stretching like a cat. ‘We began with breakfast on the train.’

‘A breakfast meeting on the train, you mean.’

‘Sure,’ she shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘His family mainly. I had no idea they had such . . . reach.’

Clover knew that this was Matty code for ‘rich’.