I grinned. “She’s told them to get an open return but my mum’s interpreted that as Fiona wanting her to stay there for a long time. But in any case I can’t stay there. I might embarrass them in front of the neighbors. Apparently I’m killing my mother. She says she can’t stop crying.”

“Really? I saw her in a café in Liverpool on Friday afternoon. She was having a cream tea with a friend and looked pretty happy.”

I laughed, feeling lighter for the first time in ages.

“Put it this way, she hasn’t lost her appetite as a result of you leaving Tom. That cake stand was empty.”

“You should’ve sent a message,” I said. “I could have phoned her, just as she was tucking in. It would have been funny to see how her expression changed.”

“I will do if I see her again.”

The waitress approached us and left the bill on our table. Oliver took out his wallet and smiled at me. “I’ll get this. So was it just that you were unhappy with Tom? I wondered whether you might be interested in someone else.”

I was startled. Had he seen me change as I grew involved with Harry? I knew Tom hadn’t noticed—he would have said if he had—and even Sarah had been astonished at my revelations. Oliver and I had always gotten on really well. Had he noticed what nobody else had?

“Tom had changed over the years,” I said, careful not to actually answer his question. “He always wanted to know what I was doing, where I was. It was suffocating at times. And things had to be done his way or I’d pay the price afterward.”

Oliver looked shocked. “He’d hurt you?”

“No, nothing like that. He just had these moods and I never knew what to expect. He’d ignore me. Blank me. He could go on for weeks, acting normal with everyone else, but not speaking to me at all.”

“I’d never noticed,” said Oliver. “How often would that happen?”

“It wasn’t often at the beginning. He could go months when everything was great. When he was moody then, I could get past it. But it’s been more and more often. For the last few years I’ve been living on my nerves, worrying about when it would happen again. Do you remember the Christmas before last? He didn’t speak to me for the whole of the holiday period.”

Oliver frowned. “I was at your house for New Year’s for drinks that year, wasn’t I? Josh was there, too. Everything seemed normal.”