We went to Ti Amo’s. Just down the High Street from Mr Ho’s, it was a good choice: it was where we’d eaten on the first night we’d moved into the house, when the dusty old living room was a sea of boxes and we couldn’t be bothered to find the plates. We’d walked up the road with our arms around each other that night, giddy with the excitement of finally owning our own home, and in such a nice area, too. We’d clasped hands across the table and fed each other morsels of aged Parmesan cheese and grissini while we’d waited in the flickering candlelight for the food to come. We’d licked our lips and gloated about our good fortune to have found the house on Albert Road. We reminisced as we walked there tonight.

‘I’m glad you remember that too,’ Rohan said. ‘Sometimes I wonder. I feel as if I’m the keeper of memories in this marriage, while you hurtle through life from day to day.’

‘Excuse me, but I paint! What’s that if not recording stuff on a canvas?’

Rohan tutted. ‘That’s not what I meant. Look, I know people say to live in the present, but you – God – you never look back; you’re never interested in wallowing in memories with me or spending an evening going through photos.’

‘That’s because life’s for living!’ I said, and ran ahead of him to the door.

Ti Amo’s was a bit of a cliché, with waiters dressed in Breton tops, red-checked tablecloths and candles that dripped wax down the sides of straw-clad Chianti bottles. The same skinny Polish waiter had worked there the entire time we’d known the place and, every time he repeated back our order, I had to stifle a giggle because he always looked as if he was about to burst into song like the gondoliers we’d seen at The Venetian in Vegas. The food was good, though – authentic and generously portioned – and I liked that it wasn’t a chain. There were only about ten tables in the place so it was intimate, too. Romantic, for the High Street.

We took our places by the window, which afforded a great view of the bus shelter, where groups of youths – age indeterminate – seemed to gather after dark to vape and kick about discarded burger boxes. I wondered what they made of us, sitting together with the candle between us; the silhouette of a couple out for a romantic meal – if they noticed us at all – then I shut that thought down before it looped back to Grace, and her scathing thoughts about date night.