And then there was Jared. On that front she deserved more punishment than her husband moving into the spare room. In the rush and busyness of the previous two days – overnighting in Turin and so on – there’d been no time to think. She’d slept on the first train. Against the rules, but no one seemed to notice or care. Then her seat had been beside Cheltenham Martin, as a single traveller, on the day-long leg to Paris and the Eurostar to London. He’d talked non-stop until somewhere south of Paris, Connie having to crane her neck awkwardly sideways as he told her about his plumbing: by some system incomprehensible to her, he’d proudly linked the renewables in his house to the fossil fuels via a clever new widget. Her head bobbed up and down, like that of a nodding dog in the back window of a seventies car, as she dropped in the occasional ‘Wow, fascinating,’ her mind fighting to find space to process what had happened with Jared.

When she’d woken to her alarm in the lakeside hotel the morning after, she felt as if the late-night interlude had been a dream. It still did not seem possible – although she was painfully aware of the after-effects of Jared’s touch: her lips were rough and sore, and she still tingled when she remembered what he had done.

But any hope that her behaviour was a fantasy, or her late – and dishevelled – return to the hotel might escape censure, was instantly dispelled by Bianca’s level gaze as Connie checked out the group. Franco must have said something, she thought miserably. Bianca looked disappointed, although there was doubt in her kind eyes. Her goodbye hug was tempered, her usually effusive warmth missing, which broke Connie’s heart. She couldn’t meet the handyman’s eye as he loaded the coach with the piles of wheelie-cases.

Now, as she lay on her back in bed, blinking in the early-morning light, she was bemused at the extraordinary licence she’d allowed an almost perfect stranger. Someone with whom she’d exchanged only brief conversation and had absolutely no future.

‘It’s just sex,’ she remembered a cheating work associate insisting. ‘I don’t love her.’ As if that made it perfectly fine. But now she thought she could appreciate the distinction. What had happened between her and Jared was just a one-off crazy thing and seemed to have nothing whatever to do with Devan. She felt almost detached from her behaviour, now she was home. It was as if that night by the lake was completely separate, contained in an illicit bubble, a million miles away from her marriage, her home, her friends.