“When Finn and I were little,” said Ava, looking out of the window, “my grandfather had this really terrible car.”

He restarted the engine and inched elaborately forward.

“Also,” Ava went on, “he was a really terrible driver.”

The Focus in front of him dithered between lanes. He fought the urge to swear and honk the horn.

“He used to take us to church sometimes,” Ava said, still looking out of the window, “and every time he stopped the car, for any reason, the engine would stall. Every single time. And he’d get really embarrassed. And Finn would look at me and grin.”

Just pick a lane.

“And because we knew he was embarrassed,” Ava continued, “we knew we shouldn’t laugh. But at the same time, it was really funny. And the more Finn looked at me, the funnier it was, and the harder it was not to laugh, and in the end, we had to spend all our journeys to church in total silence and not look at each other or speak at all, and our uncle got really worried and told our aunt he thought we were taking the whole church thing a bit too seriously.”

He manoeuvred carefully past the Focus and forced himself not to glare at the driver. “I thought you said your grandfather.”

“Actually he wasn’t a relative at all. He was just part of a couple Finn lived with for a while, until I was eighteen and they let us live by ourselves. Our childhood was like that, you see.”

“Eighteen?” He tried to imagine a girl barely older than Alicia in sole charge of another human being’s welfare. What must that have even been like? It had happened to him when he was thirty-eight and he still hadn’t felt ready for it. “But what happened to your… ”

“This is a game,” Ava said. “It’s a long drive back home so we might as well. We take it in turns to say something about ourselves the other person doesn’t know.”

“A game? So it’s not true?”

“No, it’s definitely true. That’s the rules. It’s a game, but it has to be true. Your turn.”

His conscious mind went blank, but some other part of him that seemed to know how to do this took over. To his horror, the words that came out of his mouth were, “I was sitting behind you in the café where you had lunch. I didn’t recognise you though.”

She sat very still. The hands folded in her lap were crusted with diamonds.

“Your turn,” he said.

“I was talking to my husband,” she said.

“I already know that.”

“How do you know?”

He glanced at the heavy rings weighing down her left hand.

“He might have been my lover.”

“Lovers don’t have rows like that. I know what a domestic looks like, I had enough of them when… ” He swallowed. “The way you were hissing at each other over the menus – that was marriage, all right.”