The restaurant was bright and busy. We sat at one of a dozen wooden tables arranged in the square, catering to tourists staying in the villas and apartments in and around the village. It was almost eight o’clock, but the air was still warm, thick with the smells of ribeye steak and roast duck, rich sauces and local red wine. Candles and glasses and half-empty bottles lined our table.

I sipped my wine and tried not to think about Sean and the messages, what it all meant. But I couldn’t help it. I’d spent the evening examining everything – every conversation, every look, every silence, minutely – holding each moment in my hand and studying it from every angle, trying to prise the truth from it like a pearl from a clam.

Like now, for example.

He was chatting amiably to Rowan about her business, genuinely interested, smiling and engaged, giving her lots of eye contact. He was a people-pleaser, always had been, always seemed to know the right thing to say to get on someone’s good side, always wanted to find the good in them. Was that what his affair was, how it had started? One of my friends coming on to him so strong that he just couldn’t bring himself to say no? Couldn’t bring himself to upset her?

Perhaps I had the beginnings of a theory about what might be going on.

Sean was already a glass of red wine ahead of me, on top of the beers he’d had back at the house before coming out. Russ had been constantly refilling everyone’s glasses every time he filled his own – which was often – the crimson flush of alcohol already blotting his cheeks. I couldn’t decide whether Rowan’s husband didn’t like our company, or just liked his booze. A bit of both, probably. His chair was empty for the moment as he stood beneath the carved stone portico of the church, taking long slow drags on a cigarette.

Odette, in a bright yellow dress, ran around and around the long wooden table, chasing the cats that occasionally appeared from the shadows to pick up titbits dropped by diners. She narrowly avoided colliding with a waiter and skipped away again into the gap between two tables, a defiant grin on her face.

‘Odette,’ Rowan said for the third or fourth time, ‘please come and sit down, your dinner is about to arrive.’

The little girl shook her head, long ginger bunches jiggling from side to side. She ran off again, giggling and dodging around the tables of other diners.

Further down the table, Daniel was reading his Harry Potter book while Lucy was slumped silently in her chair, absorbed by her phone.