I nod. ‘I am. Kind of. But all the stuff you’re saying now makes me realize that I’ve never travelled much and you’re right – why not do it in a way so that someone else is paying? I’ve got the rest of my life to be an accountant, after all.’

‘Exactly!’ she agrees, clapping her hands. ‘It would be brilliant. Imagine all the places we can go. White sand beaches and warm seas. Turtles even. Fish that look like Nemo and Dory. We could learn to scuba dive and wakeboard. Honestly it would be stupid not to go.’

A waiter arrives to clear the plates and offer us dessert menus, which we regard in silence for a minute or two.

‘So how about we do this aerial course together?’ I say, casually, as if it’s no big deal to me either way. ‘I bet if we can apply as a ready-made dance couple, any cruise ship would snap us up once we’re trained.’

She reaches over and grabs my hand. ‘Yes!’ she says excitedly. ‘And if you do the course too, Karen’s even more likely to think it’s a sensible use of the inheritance and let me do it without a row.’ She pauses. ‘She’s always liked you more.’

I frown. ‘That’s not true. You mustn’t say that.’ I don’t think it is true – Laura has always been the golden child. Mum would deny it, but she distanced herself emotionally from me from the day Laura was taken, and she’s never entirely come back. Laura returning was all she ever wanted.

‘It is true,’ Laura counters. ‘But whatever, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.’ She reaches into her bag to get her phone and swipes and jabs at it. ‘Look – I thought this course,’ she says, pointing at a picture of a lithe, tanned, smiling upside-down girl in a hoop hanging from a palm tree underneath the title ‘Aerial Dance in Ibiza’.

‘I’ve already been trying out a bit of aerial alongside my normal dance classes,’ she continues, ‘and you’ve been dancing pretty much since you could walk, so I figured a few months intensive in Ibiza should be enough to sort us both out.’

‘Ibiza?’

‘Yep – it’s supposed to be the best course – plus it’s better than doing it in the rainy old UK, isn’t it? And look’ – she swipes the screen to show me a picture of something that looks like a shed on a beach – ‘this is where you stay, so it keeps the cost down. It’s not exactly luxurious obviously, but look where it is! Right by the sea!’

I take the phone and look more closely. The beach looks beautiful.

Her eyes sparkle. ‘I’m so excited that you’re going to come too!’ she says, even though so far, as far as I’m aware, I haven’t agreed to anything.