Paula sank into a chair and picked up the menu, pretending to read it while instead she scrutinised Tommy and tried to figure out what was going on in his head. His face was a blank; the scowl of earlier was gone, but his ready cheery smile had not put in an appearance.

She was on the brink, she thought as she watched him. Or rather, they were. On a precipice that could lead to her plummeting down into a lonely dark cave of singledom. She thought of Julie, how she sat in the house that she’d got free and clear of a mortgage in the divorce from her cheating husband. She had her home, she had a lifestyle allowance that he still paid monthly, and yet Paula knew she would give it all up to have her man back.

She bit her lip. For the first time, she knew how her friend felt. She didn’t want to be sitting in a house that Tommy’s pot of money had given her without him in it. But was it love, she wondered, or just fear? Either way, she couldn’t think of how to make things right again.

‘Not long until we dock in Iceland,’ he said.

He had begun speaking to her again back in the suite while they were getting ready. She had walked around in her nicest lingerie, reaching back to the days when they were young and had made up the old-fashioned way after a fight. Today, as she moved around him in her underwear, deliberately and slowly, he’d kept his eyes on his phone, scrolling with his thumb, waiting patiently for her to get dressed.

‘How long do we spend there?’ she asked now, playing the game nicely in the way he wanted.

‘All day, enough time to see the scenery.’

She nodded and rolled her shoulders, tried to dissipate the tension that had built and built over the last few days. ‘Maybe see the Northern Lights,’ she said, hopeful that his current favourite topic would perk him up.

‘Maybe,’ he conceded.

She watched as he pulled his phone out and started scrolling again.

She sat up straight. ‘Can I borrow that?’ she asked. ‘I’ve not spoken to Julie in days; she’ll have been sending me messages and she’ll be worried that I’ve not answered her.’

He raised his eyes, and she shivered at the sudden intensity of his stare.

‘Yeah,’ he answered finally. ‘Let me just finish this.’

She wondered what was he thinking about her request. Did he think she had asked to use his phone so she could skip through his apps, through his texts and calls and email to see if there was anything on there from Anna?

Back and forth went his thumb, scrolling, flicking, jabbing at the screen.

Deleting?