‘I’m so sorry, Jez,’ she said gently. ‘It’s shit. Have you seen her at all?’

He shook his head. ‘She came to get her stuff, but I was at the farm. She knew I’d be out, arrived then on purpose.’

Pip shrugged sympathetically, although she would probably have done the same herself.

‘I went to the hotel,’ Jez continued, ‘to see if we could talk things through again, but they told me she was in a meeting. They were probably lying.’

‘Maybe it’s for the best that you haven’t seen her,’ suggested Pip, aware of how much she sounded like her mother. It was hard to know what to say without sounding trite or patronising. This must be what it had been like talking to her recently, not being able to find the words, worried that you would accidentally say the wrong thing and make matters worse.

He took a deep breath, sat back in his chair and looked straight at her. ‘Let’s just get pissed,’ he said. ‘Horribly, disgustingly pissed.’

Pip couldn’t remember the last time she had been even tipsy, let alone the level of drunk that Jez seemed to have in mind. She had avoided alcohol since the accident, worried that if she started drinking, she might never stop, but what harm could one evening do? It wasn’t as if she would be driving anywhere.

‘Go on then,’ she said, a broad grin creeping across her face. ‘But if you puke or you start doing that stupid dance you used to do, then I’m out of here.’

With a new sense of purpose, Jez’s mood seemed to improve, and by the time he began his third pint he seemed to have forgotten he had been miserable. Pip had no hope of matching him drink for drink – she was out of practice and she could never drink as much as him anyway – but she held her own. As the alcohol seeped into her bloodstream she felt an uncoupling inside her, as if someone had taken away the burden of her body and left her with just her mind, and she knew at once that she had been right not to drink her way through the last dark months.

By the time they had got to their sixth drink they had begun to play a rather raucous game of ‘who would you do’. It wasn’t something Pip had thought about in years, but now she remembered how much fun it was to consider a room full of people and rank them in terms of sexual attractiveness. Jez’s choices didn’t surprise her in the least, but her own were not what she would have predicted. Dominic was broad and dark with a patrician profile, but the men who caught her eye in the pub were quirkier, less alpha male and more cheeky-looking. In fact, they were a lot like Jez.