‘Do you promise . . .’

‘Shhh.’ He put a finger to her lips. ‘Trust me.’

Suddenly she felt euphoria bubbling up inside her. She kissed his hand, then grabbed it and pulled him around the studio, running, laughing, screaming.

‘Oh my God! This is it! This is where it’s going to happen! You’re a genius!’

‘No, Princess,’ said Will, taking her in a waltz hold, ‘you’re the genius. I’m just the businessman. Shall we dance?’

Ben was late, and dinner was cold, but that was nothing new; Christine actually expected it these days, and simply cooked things that were equally edible hot or not. He was at home less and less, as if he was fading out of her life, for all that she wanted to relish these final months as mother and son, before he flew the nest for good and became just another adult. Oh well, she thought, his absence will be less painful when it comes. Perhaps this is his way of breaking it to me gently.

Their nights in together had never been frequent – either she was working, or dining, or undertaking some public engagement, or he was DJing at a club, doing band practice or simply ‘out with mates’ – which, Christine assumed, meant girlfriends, although she never asked and he never told. Could be boyfriends. Could be just friends. After encouraging her children to be independent and open minded, she could hardly complain now that they were.

It had been a hard day, like every other day – on her feet in the high court, this time acting for a woman in her sixties who had given the last forty years of her life to her husband’s farming business, milking at four o’clock in the morning, raising children who now worked on the farm, taking an accountancy course so that she could do the books in her ‘spare’ time – and was not inclined to accept the £800,000 payout that her cheating bastard of a husband proposed. Christine had a figure much more like £1.5 million in mind, and was confident of getting it. She could hear the rustle of that silk gown getting ever nearer . . .

She put a couple of salmon fillets on a plate, a few new potatoes, a bit of salad, covered up the rest and put it in the fridge. If Ben got back hungry, it was there for him. If not, that was dinner sorted for tomorrow night. At least with one child theoretically living at home, Christine could motivate herself to cook. God knows what she’d do when Ben went to university. Probably exist on microwaved ready meals, like her other single friends – of which there seemed to be far too many these days. Marriages didn’t last. Nobody could say divorce was too easy – people like Christine made damn sure of that – but that didn’t put people off. She used to quip at dinner parties in the good old days that she was all in favour of the breakdown of marriage, that it had feathered her nest very nicely. Oh, they used to laugh at that one, their friends – knowing, as she now realised they must have done, the vicious irony of which Christine was blithely, smugly unaware. Well, that one certainly turned round and bit her on the arse, like a trusted family pet gone bad.