By the time she closed her front door, turned the double lock and pressed home the bolt, she was depressed and exhausted. Colin’s emails had shown none of this maudlin self-pity. In fact, he’d been quite a good correspondent – intelligent and responsive – which was why she’d agreed to meet up. How the hell am I supposed to avoid more wasted evenings like this one? she wondered, as she trudged dispiritedly up to bed.

‘Morning.’ Precious Adebayo, the acupuncturist who shared treatment rooms with Sara, popped her head round the door early the following morning. She was also Sara’s best friend – they’d met at Surrey University during an integrated medicine course twenty years ago and fallen into step as if they’d known each other all their lives. Precious had been a huge comfort in the weeks and months after Pete died. Now, her face broke into a mischievous grin. ‘Well?’

Sara sighed. ‘I’m now an expert on burger presses and how to bonk your neighbour’s wife.’

Precious sucked air through her teeth. ‘Ouch.’

‘The dastardly Barry is worthy of comic-book status.’

Her friend laughed. She was still in the doorway, already dressed in the white tunic she wore for treatments, her hair smoothed back and glistening in a neat bun. ‘Listen, I’ve got someone in a second. Tell me more at lunch.’

‘Nothing more to tell. Nothing interesting, at least. On to the next.’

But as Sara waited for her eight o’clock, she wondered if she would try again. What are the chances of clicking with someone, like I did with Pete? It just didn’t seem remotely possible – even given Colin was only her first try.

A small involuntary sigh escaped her as she remembered the summer after college when she and her friend Nem had been paddling their kayak down the Fal river in Cornwall. Rounding a bend, they found Pete in the water, hanging on to his two-man canoe convulsed with laughter, his friend Vic wobbling perilously in his wetsuit on the rocky, wooded bank, nursing a bleeding hand. They didn’t need help, but the girls stopped anyway and offered. Sara thought they were a couple of prats, but Vic insisted they meet up downriver at Turnaware Bar where their friends were waiting with copious supplies of Beck’s. Nem declared she had the hots for any man in a wetsuit –so they did. By sundown, Pete had convinced Sara that he wasn’t an idiot, just not yet very accomplished in a boat.