Just the other evening, Em had gone round to George’s flat, where Seren was already present. She’d been taking her shoes off in the hall when she overheard the little girl say, ‘I don’t like this girlfriend, Daddy. She has mean eyes’, and Em’s hand had flown straight to her throat, her mouth a shocked O. For starters, it sounded as if George had had loads of girlfriends (which he’d assured her he hadn’t); and for another thing, she so didn’t have mean eyes! She’d always flattered herself that her eyes were one – two, rather – of her best features!

‘Do you like my eyes?’ she had found herself fretting on the phone to her friend Kathy the next day. ‘They don’t seem mean to you, do they?’ It was as if she was fourteen again, and crying because one of the boys at school had made fun of her pimples. When she was forty-four, for heaven’s sake! For the record, Kathy had told her she had sexpot, bushbaby eyes and not to worry for a second, and it was all Em could do not to get a fridge magnet made up with the words, like some kind of proof.

Anyway. So that was Seren: basically, like no child Em had ever come across before. Her own two, Izzie and Jack, were both easy-going, sporty types and there were always hordes of their friends trooping in to sprawl all over Em’s sofa and ransack her fridge. Some of Izzie’s friends – Lily, for instance – called her ‘Ems’ as if they were mates themselves; she couldn’t in a million years imagine Seren ever being so pally and affable. She’d be more likely to kick Em in the shins and flick her the Vs when George wasn’t looking.

Not that Em was moaning. Of course she wasn’t. Well, maybe just a tiny bit. But it wasn’t as if they were joined at the hip and Em had to deal with Seren twenty-four/seven or anything, was it? Until now, that was. Until this very summer holiday in fact.

It had happened like this: as June had ripened into July, it had dawned on Em that she wasn’t actually looking forward to getting away quite so much now, luxury cottage or not. All she could think about was George, and how desperately she was going to miss him while they were apart. She would pine for him like a doomed heroine, a swooning girl. Was that completely tragic of her or wildly romantic? (‘Wildly romantic,’ Kathy assured her. ‘Completely tragic,’ Jenny had decreed. ‘Pull yourself together!’)