He’s a stranger, a stranger. Things with strangers haven’t worked out too well for me in the past, especially those I felt attracted to and who took an interest in me. I met a man once on another very hot sunny day, in another country, and it didn’t work out well at all.

Dad is still talking to Angela but a voice of my own is whispering in my ear, cold and rasping, ‘Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what happened in Tenerife?’ I don’t want to remember. I want to forget. Because it wasn’t the first bad thing that happened to me … But I’ll remember enough to be very careful with Salvi. I won’t open the door too wide for him, in case he steps in too far; I won’t drink too much or get too excited or let my guard drop to a dangerous level.

I pick up my phone again to start looking up the bar he mentioned.

CHAPTER 17

Salvi is not here. I’ve been stood up and it’s no big surprise. Perhaps the whole thing has been a wind-up. I’ve heard of pigging; I’ve read about it on the internet – the girl who flew to Amsterdam to meet a man who’d courted her for weeks, only to be stood up for over two hours and eventually sent a text telling her it was all a joke, as apparently she was hideously ugly. I check my phone for a taunting text, confirmation I am a pig who is the butt of someone’s enormous, ugly joke, but there’s nothing.

I’m standing in front of what looks like a disused shop entrance in an outfit Maya helped me choose yesterday morning at Loved Before, which was very kind of her as it was crazy busy in there and she was dashing between rails and the back room like a beguiling bluebottle, in a silky sapphire midi dress. The outfit is a pair of grey skinny jeans and a glittery sort of drapey top – plus a pair of wedges I’ve had for yonks. The look I’m going for is not-trying-too-hard glam. Carefree-first-date smart-casual. It’s a look I’ve never attempted before. I’m no Claudia Schiffer but I look OK.

This place is very Dickensian already. I half expect a fingerless-gloved Fagin type to haul up the shutters and scowl at me, or Bill Sikes and Bullseye to come lurking round the cobbled corner, in sudden fog. There is no plaque here saying anything about Dickens or Hard Times, though. Wasn’t that the book when he referred to school children as ‘empty vessels’? The one with the horrible headmaster? I should have a plaque above my head: ‘Here stands a terrified woman’. Because I am.