She had clicked on the details with some trepidation – her impulsive nature had seen her paying for some particularly duff decisions over the years (those neon-yellow ski boots for one, when she’d never been skiing in her life) – but Briar Cottage still looked lovely in the cold light of day, thankfully, despite being far roomier (and far more luxurious) than they actually needed. There were three holiday homes altogether, arranged around the sides of a pool, as well as a separate games-room building that Izzie and Jack might make use of. Plus the cottages were situated in the middle of gorgeous countryside, with the shops and beaches of Falmouth a short drive away. Good work, drunken me, she had congratulated herself in relief, before going on to examine her subsequent purchases with rather more eye-rolling and despair: a home rowing machine (why? she hated exercise!), several wildly extravagant cocktail dresses that she’d never actually wear and a fabulous black bouclé coat that she absolutely could not afford. And then, of course, January had begun with the usual hangover and list of impossibly strict resolutions, at which point she’d put the holiday entirely out of her head.

By the time summer eventually rocked up, with its delights of chilled rosé and dreamily golden evenings, everything had changed anyway. Changed for the better! In a nutshell, George Macleod had appeared in her life and cast a new and wonderful haze across it. George was her perfect fit – easy-going and comfortable in his own skin, so much more her kind of person than moody, controlling Dom had been. He had the best laugh she’d ever heard: loud and unrestrained, the sort you couldn’t help joining in with. How could anyone not fall in love with a man who laughed with such generous abandon? Added to which, he was successful in his career, confident at all times and there was just this steadiness about him, this unflappable nature that Em really appreciated now, as a forty-four-year-old woman, in a way that her feckless twenty-something self hadn’t particularly cared about. Plus – had she mentioned it? – he was sexy as hell. Sexy. As. Hell.

My God! It had been such a shock for her, all of that. Five years of smarting from the divorce and its fallout, five years of assuming no way would she ever so much as play footsie with another man under the table, let alone find herself romping and flirting with hedonistic glee. Not least because the post-divorce years had been relentlessly tough; a juggling act of single motherhood, career ambitions and domestic grind. As she tried to keep herself sane and her children happy, as she paid each bill, heaved the bins out every week, swore at the lawnmower and hung out a thousand loads of laundry single-handedly, she had felt herself ageing, as if the fun, free-spirited Em of her youth was shrivelling grimly away into this tight-lipped middle-aged drudge, with no way back.