What he could not have factored into his thinking was Ellis showing up at Geraldine’s wedding just days after he had sat Naomi down, taken her hands in his, admitted the awful thing he had done and then asked for her forgiveness. Appalled and sickened, she could barely bring herself to look at him, much less forgive him and had insisted that he sleep in the spare room.

For her friend’s sake – having bought at the last minute the largest hat she could find to hide beneath – she had squared her shoulders, put on a united front with Colin and had smiled her way through Geraldine and Brian’s wedding, just wanting it to be over.

But then Ellis had spotted her, and a collision course was set in motion and she had behaved in a way she would never have dreamt possible.

There was so much she shouldn’t have done that day. She shouldn’t have felt so pathetically sorry for herself and responded to Ellis in the way she had. She shouldn’t have used him in order to hurt Colin, to pay him back for hurting her. See, Colin, she wanted to scream in his face as she kissed Ellis, this is how it hurts. But it hadn’t hurt as Ellis had poured himself into her and her body had writhed in ecstasy beneath his in an explosion of angry desire.

Oh, it had been heady stuff! There on the floor of that summerhouse, for one euphoric beautiful moment, she had never felt more out of control, yet at the same time so utterly in control.

What she had thought would be a one-off moment of mad revenge proved to be no such thing. She met Ellis twice more in the week that followed, taking an extended lunch break to meet him in a hotel that was equidistant from their offices in London, where he was now working after a stint in Manchester. Afterwards she would return to work with his scent on her, fuelling her desire for the next time she would see him, the next time when his touch would ignite her.

She may well have lost her head, but she hadn’t lost her conscience entirely. With Colin still banished to the spare room, she would wake in the middle of the night full of remorse. This was not her. This was not the woman she thought she would ever be. Duplicitous. Revengeful. Reckless.

She came to her senses when a few days later she realised her period was now three weeks late. In all the emotional turmoil of the last week or so she had lost track of her dates, but when she checked her diary, she calculated she must have been pregnant before Colin’s confession. The knowledge that she was pregnant made her accept that she could no longer behave like a spoilt child getting her own back on Colin. They were now going to be parents; it was time put away childish things.