She asks Evan – eating cheese sandwiches alone in his room – to cover her next slot, even though she knows he is knackered and put upon. Nevertheless, she makes an excuse and walks through the reception, Frannie’s huge eyes tracking her. They’re a practice almost in the middle of nowhere, just three shops in a row, flats above them, fields behind. A pharmacy, an independent café and their veterinary practice. The rent was cheap out here in the sticks, and they marketed themselves as a discount vets, much to their mother’s annoyance. The business soon rolled in. People didn’t mind travelling for a bargain and an easy parking space.

It started raining this morning on her way in. Biblical rain, the sort spoken about on the news as well as the weather bulletins. A month’s worth of rain in a morning, and more still coming down. It’s so stormy that the sky is becoming dark and heavy in places, the colour of a black paintbrush dipped in clear water. Outside, it smells of wet grass and hot pavements.

In the café next door, she orders an Americano and adds milk at a small wooden station at the back. She will just take ten minutes, here, alone, to get her head together. Sitting down, she raises the mug to her lips and thinks of Will. Maybe if she thinks of him, pays her respects, perhaps it will help somehow.

As she watches the quiet café gradually fill up with people shaking out their umbrellas, self-consciously pushing their wet hair back from their faces, she sees him. The man from the baggage claim. Cathy blinks, amazed he is out here in the countryside. He has a brown bag with him, a laptop bag. He is wearing glasses today, but it’s definitely him. He has on a parka and dark jeans turned up at the ankles and the hotness is back in her cheeks.

She tries to catch his gaze, and she sees out of her peripheral vision that he stops as he recognizes her.

He walks over to her table, bypassing the counter. He brings with him the smell of the countryside in the rain, and, underneath that, that hot summer smell again. She looks up at him as she breathes in.

‘The baggage-claim girl,’ he says, his face easing into a smile. He’s older than she first thought. Maybe early forties. Dark eyes but pale lashes.

‘That’s me,’ she says.

How funny, Cathy thinks. If her bag hadn’t gone missing, she still would have crossed paths with this man here in the café, but she wouldn’t have known him, like two dominos falling over in a row, the first required to tilt the second; something Cathy thinks about a lot when she relives the phone call Frannie made to her.

He turns away from her, an arm raised in a half-wave, and Cathy finds something sweeping across her skin. Disappointment. She wants that hot-cheeked feeling.

‘Was anything broken? In your bag?’ she asks desperately.