‘Well, I suppose when you left you just forgot us.’

His tone was jokey but Pip thought she could detect a tinge of sadness in his voice, or possibly bitterness. She couldn’t be sure which. She shrugged an apology.

‘Tell me about Teresa,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. She didn’t want to hear about her, about how his life had moved on whereas hers was stuck in the doldrums and going nowhere. But it was the polite thing to do, so, at the very least, she could smile and show interest.

Jez sat up a little. ‘She’s hot!’ he said with a grin.

Pip rolled her eyes. ‘Is that it? No other reason why you’re marrying her?’

Jez smiled fondly. ‘Nope!’ he said.

There it was again, that rakish sense of humour that she used to love so much.

‘Seriously, though,’ he continued. ‘She’s great. That perfect combination of beauty and brains. She manages one of the big hotels in town. In fact, she pretty much runs the whole chain. Her boss is crap. She covers for him all the time. And she’s the youngest out of all of them.’

He looked so proud as he spoke and, even though the slightly peculiar twinge of jealousy was still hovering at the back of her mind, Pip was pleased for him. Unlike her, he deserved to have some happiness.

‘Have you got any photos?’ she asked.

Jez fished his phone out of his coat pocket, typed in his password and then scrolled through his photographs, rejecting one or two until he came to one he seemed to think would do.

‘There you go. My beautiful girl,’ he said, looking fondly at his phone before handing it over.

Pip looked down at the screen. Teresa was attractive but not really beautiful, and Pip felt a sense of relief. Having established that her ‘rival’ wasn’t a supermodel, she allowed herself to consider her more carefully and concluded that she looked like a nice enough woman, although something about the way she held her head suggested that she, too, had some of that inner confidence Pip had come across at bar school. Well, that was fine. At the end of the day, Teresa was a hotel manager in a small English town, and she was a leading human rights barrister at one of the best chambers in London. Not that it was a competition, of course.

And then again, could she really make that claim for herself any more? She was no longer sure of who she was, and she certainly didn’t have the right to look down on Teresa, who appeared to have far more things going in her favour than Pip could currently lay claim to.

She handed the phone back to Jez. ‘She looks lovely,’ she said quietly. ‘I know you’ll both be very happy.’