He made her another cup of tea – two sugars this time – and turned on the electric fire.

‘You can stay here tonight. If you’d like to. I mean, there isn’t much space, but … but you can have the bed. I wasn’t planning on doing much sleeping tonight anyway.’

Holly didn’t argue. She glanced around the room. As well as the bed, the two-seater sofa and the coffee table, there was a kitchenette with a breakfast bar. The electric fire was underneath the mantelpiece, where a real fire would once have been. On one side of the chimney breast there was a built-in wardrobe, containing Fleet’s suits, and on the other a television, which he never watched. The nicest part of the room ordinarily was a large bay window, but Fleet had covered it with the curtains when he’d turned on the lights.

‘Is this where you’ve been living?’ said Holly. ‘This whole time?’

She meant since the divorce, Fleet presumed, but actually he’d first started renting this place at the beginning of their trial separation. Which meant he’d been here … two years now. It was one of six bedsits in the converted Victorian semi. Fleet could easily have afforded something better, but he knew that moving somewhere else would be as good as an admission: that it was really over. That Holly was gone from his life. The bedsit felt temporary, and more than a small part of him wanted desperately to cling on to that feeling.

‘It’s just a place to sleep,’ he told Holly. ‘I’m barely here.’

She frowned at him, a flash of the Holly he’d been married to. She knew that if he was barely at home, it meant he was working too much.

‘Where’s all your stuff?’ she asked him. ‘There’s no way it would all fit in that wardrobe.’