When they’d first got married, she’d wondered why someone as ambitious for money and success as Colin had chosen her – rather plain, unsophisticated and totally unmoved by status symbols of any sort. He didn’t seem to value the attributes she did have – kindness, empathy, a kind of bohemian creativity, the skill of making a lovely home. When other people had asked her to do their rooms up for them he’d laughed. He took all that for granted as the minimum qualifications for being married to Colin Anderson, and just saw her flaws. She wasn’t glamorous like the other wives; didn’t shop in the places they did or want to meet for coffee in Caffè Nero. Her dinner parties lacked their style and panache. That wasn’t a word he’d learned in Dagenham when he was growing up. He seemed almost to resent her for knowing about his humble origins.

Penny sat down hard on the bed, struck for the first time with a stunning revelation: she didn’t actually like her husband, let alone love him.

The admission was horribly painful. It meant that years of her life had been wasted – except for producing her daughter Wendy, lovely, bouncy, down-to-earth Wendy. She seemed, despite the example of her parents, to have made a happy marriage to an ordinary, kind, likeable man and had ordinary, likeable children who Penny utterly adored. And then there was Tom, who lived halfway across the world and seemed half in love with money, like his father.

She fortified herself with a glass from the bottle of wine she’d stored in the fridge, and played back the message on her phone.

Colin’s irritated tones invaded the calm of the sunny bedroom. As ever, no ‘hope you’re having a lovely time’, but straight into a complaint. He’d run out of clean shirts and apparently it was in some way her fault. And when the hell was she coming back, and didn’t she remember they’d been invited to drinks with his partner and his partner’s wife?

Penny looked out of her window at the village below. The sun was a blaze of colour as it disappeared below the horizon, dipping the sails of two small boats in molten bronze. A group of elderly men argued and laughed on a wall. Children played football on the beach under the tamarisk trees. Two old ladies in black stood chatting. A comforting buzz of conversation rose from the harbourside cafes. The cicadas sang. Everywhere was the sweet, waxy smell from the tiny white flowers that Cassandra said were called angeliki.

Penny came to a decision. She wasn’t going to answer that message, or any other messages from her husband.

A dizzy sense of light-headed liberation overtook her. She had never made a decision just for herself in her life. Was this selfishness? She didn’t know, but whatever it was, it felt very good.