She held up her glass and they toasted the moment.

Her phone pinged.

‘Thanks, Gemma! Ask Sam if he wants to speak to his dad.’

A moment later Joe was talking to his son. Their conversation was brief and slightly embarrassing, overheard as it was by an amused audience at both ends. He asked about the university accommodation, about how the course was going. It really felt like there was little more to say, with so many people listening.

Even as he ended the call, he could feel the tears welling up in his eyes. He slipped down from the stool and rested his forearm lightly on her shoulder as they looked at the newly arrived image of Sam on her phone: the young Romano, a sheepish grin on his face, sitting among a bunch of friends and holding up a pint of lager.

‘Thank you,’ he said, giving her shoulder a brief squeeze before retreating to the gents’.

When he got back, she was hunched over her phone.

‘I sent you the image,’ she said. ‘Oh, another thing. Come here.’

She pulled him close, their heads touching, and took a photo. There was a firmness in the way she drew him to her, a resolve that he hadn’t expected, something more than he would have dared to show himself.

‘Gemma asked me to send her a picture of us,’ she said.

She tapped her phone. Across the skies it went, to another city.

‘I’ll send you it, as well.’

‘Please do.’

It was only a matter of decorum which led them to untangle themselves and retake their seats at the bar. Joe was entering the stage of pleasant euphoria which meant that he should stop drinking, but which he knew meant that he wouldn’t. The inevitability, as usual, was as intoxicating as the alcohol.

He wanted to take her in his arms, he told himself, as he stared at the bar in front of him, the rest of his surroundings now a dull murmur. He wanted to embrace her, to make the grand, romantic gesture, Hollywood style. But he held back. It wasn’t embarrassment. There was something else, and he couldn’t get it out of his head: the thought of a dead son and the mother left behind, of Jane Shaw sitting alone, facing the unimaginable horror of losing her only child, the rest of her life without him, without anybody.