‘But your friend, she hasn’t managed to achieve this peace. She’s looking to you for help to do that. And that’s what we do here, do we not? We help people find their peace. Just as we have.’

‘We’re a yoga retreat, not a therapist’s office. She needs to do some of the work herself.’

‘It is a long time since I’ve seen you this tense,’ he said, curling his limbs around her, nuzzling and rubbing at her shoulders. ‘Perhaps it is good for you too, to open up again to someone from your past, someone who knows that part of you? It suddenly seems as though you’re holding on to too much to be truly at peace – it must be buried somewhere there, no?’

She flinched away from him.

‘You’re being very patronizing, Niko. How would you like it if one of your junkie friends came here, expecting you to still be the same person you were then, wanting and wanting from you? Trying to pull it all back again?’

He moved off the bed, walked out of the room.

‘Most of my “junkie” friends are dead,’ he said, over his shoulder.

A low blow. Not like him; not like them. And Xanthe knew who she blamed for it.

The next night, after evening asanas and the closing of the circle, Clio put her head round the door. ‘Knock knock,’ she said, in that sheepish, ingratiating way British women always had which felt increasingly foreign to Xanthe now. She was holding a bottle of wine that she must have brought with her and two paper cups from the water fountain in the studio.

‘I thought we could have a little catch-up …?’ she said. Nikolas stood at the end of the hall, nodding and smiling – evidently they’d planned this together. The pricks.

‘I don’t like to be ganged up on. I’ve told you that,’ Xanthe muttered to Nikolas when she went to retrieve her wrap, not really caring whether Clio heard her or not. He did that loose little dip of the shoulders he always did when he was retreating from a fight, his arms gone stringy. Weed, she thought, a weed come to life, as she always did when he retreated from her. It would pass. It always did.

As they started down the path to the beach, Clio reached for her arm and Xanthe let her grope for a second, awkwardly, before they made a loose link. She had linked arms with friends before, in her schooldays, and remembered that there was a right and a wrong way to do it. The right way, your bodies locked together like you were originally built as one; the wrong way there was just the sore jostling of elbow bone.