Afterwards there was the awkward part, tissues and mopping up and clumsiness and the sticky feeling and worse than the sticky feeling, the grubby sensation that she’d done something wrong, that between them they had destroyed something rare and precious. She looked away as Mike rummaged in his boxer shorts and, using a clump of tissues from his back pocket, mopped up what she presumed was his sperm. The tissues looked worn and grubby. Why couldn’t he at least bring clean tissues? The candlelit glamour was gone, and he was just a tired spent man more than twenty years older than her, performing a graceless ablution in the dark.

When he’d finished wiping and arranging and tucking in, he glanced at the tissues, grimaced, looked towards the bin. She tried not to shudder and shook her head sternly. Emma’s father might see them and realise someone had been in over the winter, maybe even have the tissue DNA-analysed (okay, that was absurd… even her own father wouldn’t go that far. And besides, it wasn’t her… stuff… on the tissue, it was his). Still, the bin wouldn’t be emptied until Easter. What was the matter with him?

She could hardly look at him, but she was desperate for him to speak. She wanted him to make sense of the encounter. She wanted him to make it glorious instead of grubby. But what could he say? She’d sometimes imagined the word ‘love’, but where could love take them? She dug her fingernails into the soft flesh at the base of her thumbs.

The worst thing is I can’t talk to anyone about this. Not anyone at all. I mean, Katie and Emma and me, we all say we can tell each other anything, but we can’t really. Not this. What would I say? ‘Hey, you know what? I’ve got something going on with this married man’? They’d – actually I don’t know what they’d do. Look at me funny. Never talk to me again. Say it’s probably because my mother died when I was little, like that’s the only thing that’s ever happened to me that mattered.

Oh God, I really hope my mum can’t see me when I’m with him. What would she even think of me? And why doesn’t that stop me? I must be the worst person in the world.

He slotted the chair into its spot in the dust. She blew out the tea-lights and was about to pick them up when he grabbed her wrist and shook his head. The tea-lights were clear hot pools of melted wax. She would have to wait for them to cool.

Did she want him to wait with her? She was sick of his presence now, sick to her stomach, but she didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to be the one left behind, tidying up, rolling the shutter down, while she scurried off to her bedroom and tried to forget. But he wouldn’t. That wasn’t how it worked. He was treating her like a woman, not a child. It was her job to pick up the mess. Maybe this was her punishment.