How could she be so practical when he’d just told her something so shattering? But Karin, he had learned, always kept her feet on the ground. Her life despite her divorce and its repercussions was not in the mess Howard’s was. She was a highly organized person in every respect. One who managed to fit in a lover and two children with the demands of her work.

Why had he put it that way? Well, she certainly fits me into her schedule. But Howard had no grounds for supposing that her kids didn’t come first for her.

She poured him a schnapps and insisted he drink it at one gulp. But the brandy did not revive his spirits. Nothing could.

‘Would you like to eat something, Howard?’

He shook his head. ‘I ate breakfast on the plane.’

‘And you intend it should also suffice for lunch? I have in the refrigerator some cheese and also some sausage—’

‘You’re behaving like my great-grandmother used to!’

‘Sensibly, you mean.’

‘That isn’t what I’d call it.’

Karin sat down beside him on the sofa and took his hand. ‘If sympathy is what you wish for, I assure you that you have mine. But I would call how you are behaving unrealistic. The situation you have told me of, with Ben, it is not going to change overnight, and possibly it will not do so in the immediate future. I myself would not accept it. Whether you do, or do not, if you want to go on living you will have to eat.’

‘All right, Karin! If it’ll make you happy I’ll have a bloody sandwich!’

‘And I shall attribute that outburst to your red hair,’ she said before departing to the kitchen.

Not only practical, but unflappable, thought Howard.

It took but a trice for Karin to reappear with the sandwich.

Hyper-efficient, too. ‘Thanks for looking after me,’ he said ungraciously. ‘That’s not what an affair is supposed to be about, though, is it?’

‘There is one kind of affair and there is also another kind,’ she replied.

‘What does that mean?’

‘That I have had affairs before you came into my life. But I did not feel for the men what I feel for you.’

Howard put down the sandwich and took her in his arms. ‘Since I didn’t have so much as a one-night stand between my marriage breaking up and meeting you, I’m not in a position to say the same. But what I can say, Karin, is the feeling I have for you could be love.’