My job was to take care of Juliette, to get her from the boat to the hotel and back again. Now I was at the hotel and she was god only knew where doing god only knew what, unsupervised and all alone. I had always been a master of tucking my feelings into boxes and storing them away in the psychological equivalent of that warehouse from the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I could not even begin to work out how this had happened, let alone how to fix it. Filtering through my feelings, I registered shame, guilt, and embarrassment, and the fact that I’d genuinely believed Juliette wanted to be my friend added an extra spicy dash of mortification to them all.

As if my emotional pain wasn’t enough, my ankle was still extremely tender and my feet throbbed from the uphill trek in new trainers. I kicked off the shoes, then poked my left big toe into the opening of the right sock and peeled it away from my foot, holding it up and letting it hang from the end of my toe. I was that sock. Damp, sweaty, utterly redundant, and deeply undesirable. Juliette had left me behind at the first opportunity. Stew was at his ex-girlfriend’s house the moment I left the country. Without my personal phone, I couldn’t even call Jess to commiserate and, quite frankly, even if I had been able to talk to her, I was too ashamed to put what had happened into words. I silently thanked all known deities that my mother wasn’t around to see the state of me.

I was a failure. A complete failure. I stared up at the ceiling, unwelcome tears trickling down the sides of my face.

In my back pocket, my work phone buzzed through my bum cheek. I pulled it out to see Sarah’s name on the screen.

‘Hello?’ I said, swiping her onto loudspeaker and resting the phone on my chest.

‘A helicopter will collect you from the hotel’s helipad tomorrow at seven a.m.,’ she announced. ‘Be there.’

‘There’s no way to get me out of here sooner?’ I asked.

‘Not unless you want to find a way to find a hydrofoil to take you back to Naples, a taxi from Naples to the airport, and a last-minute ticket from Italy to Stansted without your passport or your credit cards.’

She’d lost me at Stansted.

‘Have you spoken to Juliette?’

‘She wasn’t feeling terribly chatty.’

‘She’s not coming?’

‘She’s not coming.’

I gnawed on my thumbnail, determined not to cry on the phone.

‘While I attempt to unpick this mess, I’m asking you to stay put and stay quiet,’ Sarah ordered. ‘Please remember you’re still under an NDA and if even a hint of a whisper of this gets out—’