Then the screen of his phone lit up on the table and Duncan tilted his head to check it out. ‘She’s come to join us,’ he said.

Dan looked at the screen. Ali Connor sent you a message.

‘C’mon.’ Duncan pushed the phone to Dan. ‘Let’s see what it is.’

Dan picked it up and opened the link, privately at first, to decide if he felt like sharing. Then, ‘Joni Mitchell,’ he said. ‘“A Case Of You”.’

Duncan said, ‘What a song,’ but Dan only switched the phone off and put it down. They’d listened to Blue on that long drive north; she was educating him, she’d said; weaning him off guys with electric guitars. ‘You are in my blood, like holy wine.’ How could he ever listen to that song again, and not break down from the loss of her? He looked at his friend, and Duncan waited.

‘I’m trying to harden my heart,’ Dan said. ‘I thought I was doing great, but I was fooling myself. It’s like trying to shake off my own shadow.’

They were silent for a while, then Duncan said, ‘So, you were going to leave Katelin?’

Such a simple question. Appalling in its simplicity. Leave Katelin. Leave his life partner, as if it was no bigger deal than getting off one bus, jumping on to another. Well, yes, in Australia it had seemed that easy. More than that, it’d seemed like the only thing to do, as if his life, his fate, was being adjusted by a higher authority. And there was Sheila, driving him all the way to Adelaide airport, telling him his principal duty was to his own heart. And there was Alison, beautiful, vulnerable, complex, incomparable. She’d sung to him in the car, too; sung ‘Chelsea Morning’, another Joni song he hadn’t known, but God, it was one of the defining moments of his life, South Australia outside the car window, Alison Connor beside him, Joni Mitchell’s poetry, Alison’s voice. Alison.

Duncan, bringing him back to the present, still waiting for an answer, said, ‘So?’

‘Yeah,’ Dan said. ‘I was going to leave Katelin.’

In early March the women flew back to Edinburgh from London, so there was no reunion on the platform of Waverley Station, instead they shared a cab home and it dropped off Rose-Ann in New Town then continued down to Stockbridge with Katelin. Dan hadn’t known how he’d feel when he saw her, or if she’d sense a change in him, but it turned out she was too full of her trip to notice that Dan might be more subdued than she’d expect. She was lightly freckled, very talkative, a little plumper than before – Desperate Dan portions, she said – and she wore an LA Lakers baseball cap with her red hair swinging out of the back of it in a ponytail, like a cheerleader on match day. She was golden with sunshine, effervescent; the adventure had done her good, she said. She was ready for a break from Rose-Ann, mind you, but they’d had an amazing time together, amazing. ‘She overthinks,’ Katelin said when they were in the house. ‘That’s all I’d say. She overthinks every decision, weighs up the pros and cons until you can hardly remember what it was you’re meant to be deciding. And she had a lot to say about Duncan’s transgression: we chewed that one over all the way from JFK to Cincinnati.’