Joe and I ate our meal and talked long into the night. When we were halfway through our third bottle of wine, I put my feet on Joe’s lap and he massaged my left ankle. I watched him in the candlelight. His face was so dear to me, so familiar.

Joe must have felt my gaze on him because he looked over and his eyes found mine and we stopped speaking, we looked at one another. He reached for my hand and I gave it to him and our fingers twined. He drew me to him and we kissed. I was drunk, but not too drunk to recognise the rush of emotion when emotion had been so long suppressed; the longing for Joe, the pull towards him. The desire was as strong as it had been when we were young. The love was there, just as it had been the day that Daniel was born, when neither of us could quite believe that two hopeless cases like us could have produced a child as perfect as he. The affection was there too; the friendship. We were drawn together and I had no wish to resist.

After a while he took my hand and led me upstairs. We went up to my bedroom and Joe lay me down on the bed. It had been ten years, but our bodies hadn’t forgotten what they knew about one another. Our arms, our legs, our heads, our tongues, our hands, they remembered what to do and where to go. So what that our bodies were older and less resilient than they had been; we were still the same people underneath. We were still us and we knew how to make one another happy.

It was as if we had never been apart.

Joe did not cry out, like he used to, when he came. He was quiet. He rested for a moment above me until I had to move, because he was heavier than he had been and his weight was pressing down on me.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said as I squeezed out from underneath him. I wasn’t as lithe as I used to be either. I wondered if he noticed the difference, the softness around the hips and breasts, the boniness of the shoulders, the loosening skin at my neck. Time had brought small changes to both of us, changes we wouldn’t have noticed if we’d stayed together but which now were new territory. It was as if the comfort of being with a man I knew very well had been combined with the mystery of being with one I hardly knew at all.

Once we were settled, side by side but with our lower legs tangled companionably together and his arm around my shoulder, Joe smoothed the hair from my face and I felt a sudden shyness.

I tried to turn my ageing face from the moonlight, but he held it still.