It was true, she supposed: that was how their paths had collided in the autumn after graduation. At first she’d thought her black mood was some kind of post-university slump, the inevitable dip caused by the end of three intense years living with her three brilliant new best friends. They’d all returned to their respective home towns – initially, at least – and Jennifer had felt a loss of something so fundamental, so important, that she didn’t know if she would ever find it again. It wasn’t that she missed her middle-school friends back in California; that was a long way behind her by then, and she’d already started to think of herself as more British than American. But it felt like an ending to the best three years of her life. Summer came and went without the black cloud lifting, and when a routine visit to the GP ended with her breaking down in tears and sobbing her heart out, she was referred for counselling.

It wasn’t love at first sight. That wasn’t how Alistair affected her. But slowly, over the weeks and months, she began to look forward to seeing him more and more. She would feel a little lift, a little brightness, when her Wednesday sessions came around with this calm, kind man who seemed to have all the answers, who could relax her, who was the first man who actually listened to her. The first man who understood her. Almost ten years older, already married and divorced, he had a wisdom about him, a tranquillity, that she found intoxicating. He was a scholar, a thinker, a lifelong student of the mind. He had answers for questions she’d not even realised she had.

And then, one February Wednesday, she had made a decision. She bundled herself up in her thickest coat, gloves, scarf and boots and settled herself on a park bench across the street from his practice, after her session was over. When he came out to buy his lunchtime sandwich from the little deli on the high street, she followed him and just ‘happened’ to bump into him as he sat at the window seat with his pastrami-on-rye.

That was how it started.

They had sailed pretty close to the wind in terms of his code of professional ethics because in the early days there were times when they had got a bit carried away. But he’d avoided trouble by having her assigned to another therapist, so that their burgeoning relationship could be above board, out in the open. Everything had happened quickly after that. Moving into his flat, then a little house together, a baby, then another, a bigger house, then a civil wedding with two of the cutest little pageboys you could ever wish for. Jake, her sweet, sensitive, complicated firstborn with a head of golden hair, and Ethan, who was just . . . Ethan. Her sensible second child.