By midday I’d been star-fished on my towel for two hours. My dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre laid unopened next to me. I’d been intending to reread it this week before my students began it next year, but for once I had switched off from work, from home. From everything. The sand moulded to my shape, cradling me in its warmth. The tender skin around my chest was beginning to sting. It took a gargantuan effort to lever myself onto my elbows. Nell was shrieking in the ocean. Jumping over crystal waves. Screeching at a boy named Josh to stop splashing her.

I became aware of eyes on me. Making a pantomime of adjusting my hat, tucking my hair in, I twisted my head left to right until I saw him. It was the boy from the bar. I prickled with embarrassment, recalling how I’d run away in tears last night when he had tried to give me back my flower. Instinctively, I sucked in my stomach while covering my pasty sausage legs with my towel. When I’d first suggested booking Alircia for a honeymoon, the idiot I had almost married told me I needed to lose at least a stone if I wanted to look half decent in the one-piece swimsuits he always said suited me better than bikinis.

I had tried.

Picking at salad while he tucked into steak and chips; sitting in the cinema, my lap empty, while he balanced a giant tub of buttery popcorn, the smell making me salivate. After I’d been dumped though, I’d stuffed myself with ice cream to cool my humiliation and I’d probably put on those few pounds I’d lost, and more. It hadn’t seemed important what I weighed. But now it did. Was the boy from the bar wondering why I was the only girl on the beach in a one-piece? Imagining that my body underneath was covered in boils? From behind the safety of my sunglasses, I stole another glance in his direction. Rather than staring at me with horror or disgust or even amusement, he wore an expression of something else. Admiration? Interest? There was no way I was up for a holiday romance, but still it gave me hope that my bruised and battered self-confidence might one day heal. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at me like that. The last time anyone had looked at me properly at all.

It hit me that my fiancé had long stopped loving me, if he ever had, and for the first time I felt I might have had a lucky escape.