I’m glad we got to speak. It’s not goodbye, it’s farewell!

Nina xx

Did Camilla definitely visit during that time? I check my own diary to see how often I visited Nina during that period earlier this year. I covered a wedding on Valentine’s Day and the two weekends on either side of it. Nina said that she and Stuart weren’t going to do anything particularly special for Valentine’s A) because Stuart doesn’t agree with “being forced to be romantic” by card companies and B) because they had their date night every Tuesday (the day they first met in Ibiza), which they’d stuck to religiously for as long as I can recall. Valentine’s Day this year was on a Wednesday. If Camilla visited during that time period, then it would make sense why she didn’t come to the funeral. Two long-haul trips in short succession would probably have been impractical and expensive.

What doesn’t make sense is that they met in secret, why Camilla kept her visit from the rest of us. Things I don’t like to think about resurface. Seeing the words going back and forth between Nina and Camilla still have an incredible amount of power to wound. Heat warms my face as one such unsettling example plays out in my mind.

Nina couldn’t sunbathe for a few days in Ibiza as she’d been badly burned the previous day. We hung around in the shade reading before setting off to have an early dinner at the bar where Camilla worked. As we arrived, Camilla stretched out her arms and enveloped Nina into a hug.

“Careful,” I said. “Nina’s in pain.”

Camilla muttered something to Nina that sounded like, “Is she playing Mum again?”

I acted like I didn’t hear, that I wasn’t crushed. I didn’t look at Nina to gauge her response. Maybe on a subconscious level, I was scared of what I’d see.

“I hate being the peacekeeper,” Nina had said to me more than a few times.

The way she said it, it was as though it was my doing, however much I tried to get her to understand that I just wanted us both to be happy.

Instead, I tried to act cool and not look disapproving. Camilla’s job involved writhing around in a barely there, see-through bikini in a giant champagne glass filled with water. After each twenty-minute stretch, the person taking over from her would climb up the adjacent makeshift, red-painted wooden steps and hand her a towel as they swapped places. In the chill-out zone on the terrace, masseurs offered head massages, and aromatherapists and fortune-tellers entertained in among the bar staff hard-selling two-for-one cocktails and shots.

It was me who initially spotted an impossible-to-miss Stuart—he was blatantly out of place with his sweater over his shoulders, the arms wrapped in a neat knot. His trainers were new; there was no attempt to scuff them up a bit and make them look a little worn. He was pristine and smiley with white teeth and clean trousers.