‘According to Julia it does, because it will muck up what I have to take later.’ He downed the last of his glass of wine and placed it on the table, decisively.

‘Right!’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I might just whizz home and take it before I drop you back. That okay with you?’

‘Of course,’ I said, although inside I wished I could just go straight home. I hadn’t banked on seeing Julia quite yet but decided I might as well get the rapprochement with the in-laws over in one evening.

We pulled up in front of the house with the familiar crunch of gravel on the driveway.

I got out of the car and followed Patrick inside. He called out, ‘Darling!’ in a cheery voice and was met with an, ‘In here,’ from Julia’s study, which was one of the first rooms down the hallway on the right.

‘I’ll just get that tablet,’ said Patrick, heading for the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘You go and say hello.’

I poked my head into the open door of Julia’s study. She was sitting in warm lamplight on a sofa that took up one end of the room. The dark red walls were covered in various posters of books she had published, plus one large poster for an Oscar-nominated movie called Loves Me Not. This had been an international bestseller that ended up being made into a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Stone. Julia (or more likely her assistant) had discovered it in what they called the ‘slushpile’, in her business. That’s the constant stream of manuscripts from hopeful, unpublished writers that arrived every day in her inbox.

She had a soft, grey blanket over her knees and her glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her face looked thinner than the last time I had seen her.

‘Hi,’ I said, a little shyly. She rose from the chair without a word and clasped me in a hug. Her head only came up to my chin. I hugged her back, a bit shocked to smell that her hair wasn’t very clean. Apart from the last time I had seen her, that strange night when I had felt unwelcome at the front door, I had almost never seen her anything less than immaculate. It troubled me.

The hug seemed to go on for longer than was usual and, when she pulled away, her eyes were sparkling a little with emotion in the reflected light of the lamp. I could feel my wariness dissolving.

‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. She smiled what seemed a sad, slow smile.

‘It’s so good to see you, Elliott,’ she said in her low, perfectly modulated voice. ‘We have missed you, you know.’