“Accidents happen,” Nick said. “I’ll go mop up and get a replacement at the bar.”

He reached for my hand, but Baxter surged past and took him by the elbow. “Allow me, chappie. I’m empty anyway,” he said, shoving both of them through the crowds. Nick shot an apologetic look back at me before he and Baxter got swallowed up in a fresh surge of partyers.

Awkwardly, I turned back to the group, and found that the other three men had vanished while my back was turned, off to search for other mediocre white men at whom to make self-congratulatory noises. I saw no one I knew or even recognized. There was a cluster of women by the door, so I drifted in that direction, but one of them spied me coming and tensed up and said something in a low voice to her cohorts, so I walked right past and back into the entryway as if that was where I was heading all along.

But I felt foolish standing flat-footed and alone as new arrivals greeted old friends, flowing around me as if I were a rock in a riverbed, to be skirted at all costs. I pulled my phone out of my bag and punched in a message to Cilla.

Is it too late to come to Yorkshire?

She sent back a photo of Gaz huddled underneath three blankets, wearing a thick turtleneck sweater. Bloody heat’s gone out. Think we can all get to Lisbon by midnight?

I resolved to press on; Nick would surely find me, if I didn’t stumble upon him first. But Merysfield Park’s rooms flowed into each other higgledy-piggledy, and were dimly lit, and I swiftly regretted my decision. Even children know that the emergency protocol when you get separated is to stay exactly where you last saw each other, and it was becoming apparent that I was in a social emergency that had me feeling every bit as small as when I was six and lost in Kmart. I strode through room after room with faux purpose, as if I were on my way to see friends in the very next one, rather than trying to outrun the judgments floating past me.

“…of course Nick’s ditched her already. No surprise there…”

“Maybe he just wanted her off the sofa…”

“…so dumpy. Is she pregnant?”

That one stung. People talking about me as if I weren’t in the room wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but I hadn’t expected to be confronted with it at a private social event with the supposedly tight-knit posh set, and certainly not with such vitriol. Annabelle had never been anything but friendly to me, but her set of aristocrats clearly viewed me as a fast-moving train they couldn’t believe hadn’t crashed yet.

“…shocked he brought her at all, thought this was his freebie…”

“…seemed pretty open last year, wonder what’s changed…”