‘Different? Is that how I look now?’ she asked, moving closer to him, not taking her eyes off him. He seemed smaller, almost inconsequential, this little man who had been such a huge part of her life for so long. It turned out, he was nothing to her and she was even less than that to him. ‘Funny, but there are so many better words to cover how I might be looking today,’ she said smiling at him, but the expression held no joy, apart from the momentary satisfaction of having caught him on the back foot. ‘How does betrayed sound? Or maybe foolish? Two-timed, perhaps? Or is that just a term for when you’re a kid – surely at this stage in our lives, what you’ve been doing with Anya Hegarty is having an affair, so what does that make me, Eddie? Apart from stupid?’

‘I… what, no, no, you have it all wrong, Liv. It’s not what you think it is. I wouldn’t…’

‘Oh, Eddie, but you would and you did. I saw you both, with my own eyes and everybody knows about it, the whole village, but you already know that probably.’

‘But we’re… living together, the flat and… everything.’ He didn’t even try to deny it. If she’d hoped he’d beg for another chance, it had not come. Silence filled the air between them. At her back, Liv heard Barbara linger almost soundlessly beyond the flimsy partition wall.

‘No, Eddie, we’re not living together anymore. You came to stay in my flat for a night or two and I should have thrown you out ages ago,’ she said with far greater confidence than she felt.

‘Come on, Liv, we can be grown-up about this, surely. You and I… we never actually… I mean, there were no promises, no real rules about what we were…’ He was scrambling, stopping because maybe, for once, he was faced with exactly what she thought they were.