THE GINS KEPT on coming, causing the bar to grow pleasantly hazy around Anna. Everyone got noisy at some point, counting loudly then cheering and hugging and kissing each other. Anna ignored them all, too intent on shoehorning herself into a state of oblivion. Someone shoved a pint of water her way – possibly the bartender – which she drank enthusiastically, and after that the gins didn’t come quite so frequently. And when they did come in the goldfish-bowl glass, they tasted suspiciously like tap water.

The nice bartender with the beard tried to ask her what her name was and if she was all right once or twice, but she rested her forehead on the bar so she didn’t have to look at him and waved him away with her hand. That made her giggle. She felt like the Queen. All she needed was a pair of white gloves and she’d be golden.

‘Do you have any gloves?’ she said, lifting her head and squinting at Mr Nice Beard.

He shrugged, but then he crouched behind the bar and returned a moment later with a pair. Anna put them on. They weren’t quite the long, white, satin ones she’d been expecting, more a kind of knitted mulberry, but they certainly were gloves, so she couldn’t complain too much. Why had she wanted them again? Had her hands been cold? She laid her head back down on the bar and tried to remember.

She didn’t know how long she stayed like that before a crushing headache began to creep up on her. Keeping her right temple in contact with the bar, she flapped a mulberry hand at Nice Beard. ‘More gin,’ she mumbled, then giggled again, wondering if the Queen ever said the same thing to the nice bearded footmen at the palace.

But before the gin came, the headache began to spoil everything, sharpening her thoughts, bringing her closer to consciousness. Dammit.

Without warning, a memory from earlier in the evening assaulted her – the moment Brody had turned and looked at her. The sensation of sprinting into something solid repeated itself, the impact so powerful that Anna nearly toppled off her stool.

‘No,’ she whimpered to somebody (she wasn’t sure who). ‘Brody is a friend, that’s all. A very good friend.’

The someone laughed. They clearly didn’t believe her.

‘Shut up,’ she said, opening her eyes and swivelling her head to look around. The laughter only got louder. Harder. But there was no one looking at her, no one taunting her. Only the voice inside her skull. The room began to spin.

She pushed herself up and stared at the bartender. ‘I don’t love him!’ she declared emphatically. ‘I don’t.’

It didn’t matter how much the feelings had whipped and whirled inside her when she’d seen him. It didn’t matter how everything she knew about him – his quiet strength, his beautiful imagination, his rough laughter – wound themselves together and stabbed her straight through the heart. She just didn’t, and that was that.