Rowan and I exchanged a confused glance. It seemed painfully obvious to me why her son was as sick as a dog, and I couldn’t work out why Jennifer hadn’t made the same assumption.

Jake groaned, a deep guttural sound like an animal in a trap. He dry-heaved again, his stomach bucking with the effort, but only a thin string of bile came out. Jennifer didn’t flinch.

‘Oh dear, Jakey, what are we going to do with you? Was it something you ate at dinner?’ She turned to the rest of us. ‘What did we have for dinner, the pasta and chicken? Maybe the chicken wasn’t fully cooked through?’

Izzy sighed and spoke up. ‘It’s not the chicken, Jennifer. It’s the St Chinian. Two empty bottles of wine down there with them in the gorge, and Jake had the lion’s share, apparently.’

Jennifer scowled up at her. ‘We don’t know that for sure, do we?’ More quietly, she said, ‘Have you been taking your medication, Jakey?’

He gave a another non-committal grunt.

‘Oh, you poor boy,’ Jennifer said, rubbing his back. ‘You poor, poor boy.’

I went to check on Ethan, lying a few yards away. He was stretched out on the coarse grass, flat on his back, eyes open to the night sky. I knelt down next to him.

‘Are you OK, Ethan? Your dad’s gone for some water. Do you want to be sick?’

He turned his head, looking at me coolly.

‘M’all right.’

‘You sure?’

‘Just going to have a little sleep.’

‘How much did you have?’

‘Only a bit. Maybe half a bottle.’

‘Really?’

‘Jake had a lot more than me.’ He blinked slowly. ‘The wine.’

‘He’s brought most of it back up again, apparently.’

‘Hmm.’ He snorted, looking back up at the canopy of stars overhead. ‘He was on a mission.’

‘Looks like you both were.’ I thought back to my teenage years, booze smuggled out of my parents’ house to drink in the park; laughing at anything, everything, laughing until it hurt, until tears came. Jake and Ethan didn’t look like they’d been laughing. ‘What was the mission?’

A long, slow blink. Then another. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

I leaned closer. ‘What, Ethan?’

He closed his eyes. ‘What’s that word again? That Bastille song?’

He wasn’t making sense.

‘What song, Ethan?’

The word came out slowly, one syllable at a time.

‘Oblivion.’

I looked across to Jake, motionless on the grass. Mission accomplished, it seemed to me. Whatever Jennifer had said to him about the incident earlier today – with Daniel being left on his own in the villa – I guessed that Jake had had an extreme reaction to being told off. Or maybe it was something to do with the water polo incident.

‘Just stay here, your dad’ll be back in a minute.’

Ethan gave the slightest of nods. ‘No hurry.’