‘Of course I do,’ he laughed. ‘We were good together, Grace, and we did have our good times, didn’t we?’

And it was true, they’d had lots of good times. So many times, when they would laugh until their faces hurt, so many times he would make her feel like the most important person in the whole world.

‘Yes we did, didn’t we?’ She nodded.

‘It would be our anniversary in a few months. Twenty years – if you hadn’t divorced me, obviously,’ he said as he took a sip of brandy. ‘So why did you divorce me, Grace?’

‘Are you serious?’

He nodded.

‘You know why, Nathan.’

He just stared at her. Why wasn’t it enough for him that they were getting along? Why did he have to keep dragging the past up?

‘Because, Nathan, you were a monster. A bully and you shagged anything with a pulse. Does that answer your question?’

He shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’

As far as she could tell, he seemed to genuinely look back on their relationship as some wonderful time in their lives, when nothing could be further from the truth. She thought about that day she’d mustered the courage to see a solicitor about divorcing him. She was terrified and excited at the same time. She remembered her hands shaking when she signed the papers and the relief she felt when he finally agreed to sign them too.

‘I could hardly believe it when you signed the divorce papers,’ she said.

‘I thought about refusing, but I knew I had no grounds to appeal when I was doing twelve years.’ His laugh was tinged with sarcasm. ‘Unreasonable behaviour, wasn’t it?’ he said with a wry smile.

She tried to change the subject as this was a road she didn’t want to go down with him. She could have kicked herself for agreeing to wander down memory lane with him, especially when his memories seemed to be of the halcyon days of their youth, rather than the horror of it.

‘Well you have Kayleigh now,’ she said jovially. ‘And she’s lovely.’

‘I still love you though, Grace,’ he said, his voice thick with emotion.

She swallowed the drink she was taking and just stared at him. She knew that he wanted her to tell him that she loved him too, but she couldn’t. She didn’t. Her instinct was still to want to make him feel better; she knew that little boy inside him always felt he’d never be quite good enough. Even after all that time, after everything he had done, she still had that reflex to comfort him. But she would never give him even a glimmer of hope.

‘That’s just the brandy talking,’ she said instead.