She sighed. ‘I don’t know, really…’

That wasn’t what Brody wanted to hear, he discovered. He wanted her to say Salsa Guy was ugly or unbearably dull or had an extremely bad case of halitosis.

‘Jeremy’s nice,’ she continued wistfully.

Jeremy? Good grief.

‘He’s great company, confident and funny… And he’s a great dancer.’

Good for sodding Jeremy, Brody wanted to say, but he kept his mouth firmly closed. She’d turned him down, after all. There must be something wrong with the guy.

‘But…’

‘But what?’ he asked casually.

‘He’s not Spencer,’ she finally said with both weariness and conviction. ‘He’s just not Spencer.’

And neither are you, Brody told himself. Don’t go all stupid. You’ve been starved of good conversation for too long. Of course you’re going to get attached. It’s just a fact of human psychology.

‘Brody?’

She pulled him out of his thoughts and into the present. ‘Mm-hmm?’

‘Do you think we could FaceTime or Skype sometime? I’d really like to talk to you face to face.’

Brody sat there, stunned. He hadn’t been expecting her to ask that, which was probably strange, seeing as it was a fairly normal way to communicate these days. ‘Um… I don’t have those apps on my phone.’

‘But you could download them, right?’ She paused for a moment and then added, ‘If you wanted to.’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, answering both questions at once, even if he was the only one aware of that. ‘My phone is pretty basic. And the signal here isn’t very good.’ He was making excuses now. Why?

‘Oh, okay,’ Anna replied. ‘It was just a thought. We can chat about it another time. Anyway… I’d better go now. It’s almost one, and I’ve got to be up at seven. Until next time, Brody. Thanks for the chat – as always.’

‘Night, Anna. And, as always, no problem. You don’t have to thank me. I enjoy talking to you.’

He could hear her smiling before she responded. ‘I enjoy talking to you too.’

And then she was gone, leaving him feeling warm inside but also pondering why his initial reaction to video calling with Anna had been to resist the idea. He stood up, collected his glass and laid his mobile phone back in its place on the desk. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her face, that was for certain, so what was it?

Lewis, who, only moments before, had looked as if you could drive an articulated lorry past him and he wouldn’t have stirred, leaped to his feet, looking hopeful. He blinked at Brody.

‘Come on, young man,’ Brody said, as he headed out the study, turning the light out behind him. ‘One last run down the garden for you.’

As he waited at the back door, Brody stared into the night sky. His and Anna’s relationship had started off as voices only and that was what he was comfortable with, he realized, so why shouldn’t it continue that way? It was probably sensible too, given the boundaries they’d put on not knowing more about each other than first names and general locations.