He introduced himself as Mr Burgh and explained that he was the manager of the hotel. This raised a bit of an eyebrow from Hanna, who had made the reservation with somebody different, but it was late, and both of them were tired, and the mystery of the recently replaced hotel manager would need to wait for another time.

Mr Burgh checked them in with benign efficiency, and they were helped upstairs by a skinny young man who couldn’t have been more than twenty. The room itself was sumptuous, with a four-poster bed and fresh flowers, and a portrait of some woman in a white dress like the mysterious, tragic victim in a Victorian ghost story.

It was perfect. It was fucking perfect. Perfect enough that for a moment it was really hard for Liza to stay angry at Hanna for booking it without consulting her.

“They had more modern rooms,” Hanna explained, still a little defensive, “but I thought you’d want something classic.”

She did. Because even though part of her—quite a large part of her—thought that being into gothic splendour and old-world opulence was problematic and imperialist, and probably internalised colonialism or internalised classism or something, Liza fucking loved this shit. The rain was turning to hail now, rapping a tattoo against the windowpanes, but she could already imagine the view over the highlands and how majestic it would look. How it would feel to stand there and gaze out over the lochs and mountains like she was the heroine of some gothic novel. Or the villain.

And perhaps it was subversive. Here she was, a girl from Tooting Bec whose grandparents had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush, and she’d married a swanky city stockbroker and was staying in a room Queen Victoria might have stayed in. Or perhaps it was just capitalism masquerading as subversion.

“It’s …” Liza tried. But gratitude was still at war with anger. “It’s really thoughtful,” she said flatly. “Of course, actually asking me first would have been more thoughtful.”

Hanna sat down on the bed. Not that long ago—and when had they reached the point where three or four years counted as not that long—the sight of Hanna perched on the edge of a four-poster bed in an elegant hotel room would have been it for the evening. They’d have been lost in each other until gone midnight, a private fantasy of wanting and longing that made all the difficult parts of their relationship seem trivial.

Without even looking up, Hanna said, “We’ll miss dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Neither am I, especially, but Emmeline White is the head chef here.”

Liza looked blank.

“The one with the big glasses and kooky earrings who sometimes judges a round on Great British Menu.”

“Oh, right.” There was still a tension in the air, but the drive and the relatively pleasant surroundings were bleaching hostility into apathy. “I like her.”