If I hadn’t known it was Joe in front of me, I wouldn’t have recognised him. His whole shape and demeanour were different. It wasn’t just the hair, although his ears were very brown against the silver; his shoulders were broader and his walk was no longer a relaxed lope, but more of a marching gait. He no longer hunched his shoulders. He no longer dragged his feet. I was probably different too. I wondered how other people saw us: a couple clearly not in harmony, the man walking ahead, the woman behind with her recalcitrant suitcase. They probably thought we were the kind of miserable, long married pair who had hen-pecked one another so comprehensively over the years that we’d lost the capacity for humour, or kindness.

What did it matter? Who cared what anyone thought?

I followed my ex-husband out into the brightness of the outdoors and the oven-like warmth. I breathed in the new, foreign landscape: herbs and exhaust fumes, a dry wind. The suitcase tipped again and Joe turned.

‘Let me…’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, tetchily. ‘I can manage. I’m fine.’

We carried on, he striding ahead, the case bumping in my way. I followed him past taxi ranks and car parks to the bay where the hire car was parked, small and dusty, one of a number of Fiats in a line beneath the twiggy shade of a row of lime trees. The windows had been wound down a couple of inches.

The doors to the car beside ours were wide open and a young girl was sitting in the passenger seat, her bare feet up on the dashboard, staring at the phone she held in one hand while picking at her teeth with the thumbnail of the other. She looked at us over the top of round, pink plastic sunglasses, then turned back to the screen.

‘It’s not much of a car,’ Joe said with a hint of apology in his voice – or perhaps it wasn’t apology, perhaps he wanted to convey that he was used to driving bigger, better vehicles.

‘It’s fine,’ I said.

‘It was all they had.’

‘It’s fine.’

Joe put my suitcase into the boot and I climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door, pulling it shut with a thunk, just loud enough for Joe to intimate that I was annoyed. Then I wished I hadn’t, because he would definitely have picked up on the fact that the almost-slam of the door had been deliberate. Or perhaps not. We had been apart for ten years; he would have forgotten how to read subtleties in my behaviour by now, wouldn’t he?

My heart gave a flutter of panic. Does he still know me? No! No! Of course he doesn’t! But what if he…? Stop it, Edie. Stop, for God’s sake!

Joe climbed into the car and started the engine.