My voice trails off. He looks at the ticket in my hand as though it’s a turd and at me as though I am a mad witch who has just escaped a drowning. I shrivel under this look on his face until I feel exactly like a wizened witch, decrepit and desiccated. Twisted and hideous. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder and if the beholder is looking at you the way Salvi is looking at me right now, then you are ugly, ugly, ugly.

‘Thank you,’ he says finally, his voice so quiet I can barely hear it above the traffic. ‘Yes, I did get your text.’ He sighs and looks at his watch. ‘I haven’t got time for lunch, I’m afraid, is that OK?’

‘Yes, that’s OK,’ I say brightly. ‘Of course it is. I’m sorry for bothering you.’ Now I sound like a meek bloody below-stairs housemaid, chastised for daring to arrive at Master’s chamber five minutes early, to ask if she can draw his morning bath.

He looks at me again, a detached stare, like he’s seeing me for the first time – curious, almost – then, to my utter, utter relief, his face breaks into a belated smile and the sun comes back out.

‘I’d love to come. When is it?’ I hand him the ticket. ‘Tomorrow night, yes, I can make it.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘That’s really great.’

He puts the ticket in his inside jacket pocket and goes to give me a kiss on the cheek, my bad side, but I’m so grateful he has given me this crumb, I let him. He won’t have his hands inside my jacket this lunchtime, we won’t be snogging over a wonderfully neglected bowl of arrabiata and a savoured bottle of Merlot – so I let him kiss my bad cheek. He smiles at me after the kiss, a clipped, finite, professional smile I sense he reserves for his clients in court or, worse, his opponents. I have the terrible feeling, yet again, that’s the last I’ll see of that ticket, and of him, but then he corrects his smile into something a little less disarming and the sun comes out again.

‘Bye.’ He is already walking away. There’s a whole line of cabs now, at the kerb. He leans in through the window of the first one and says what sounds like ‘Capaldi’s’ – is that the name of a restaurant? – and he gets in, sliding the door shut, settling straight down to look at something on his phone and the cab sets off in the wake of the previous one.

CHAPTER 36