She thought about it. ‘I’d like to walk around,’ she settled on. ‘Maybe down through Southwark to The Tate? I’d even like to go in, walk around there too.’ She bit wistfully into a pain au raisin. ‘So much culture, everywhere,’ she marvelled. ‘That’s what I miss most, I think. There’s just so much to do here, no matter what the hour, no matter what the day. It’s not like that up there, is it?’

‘Ahhhh,’ Thomas replied, pouring himself a coffee. ‘You see when I’m on the road what I miss is the countryside, and the hills, and Havingley.’

‘How lucky you are to have both,’ Penny said. ‘I feel like for me I have to choose one or the other.’

‘Not long now though, right? Didn’t you say you were going to give it a year?’

Penny tore into a second croissant. ‘A year until I ask Uncle David what the new plan is, yeah. I’m enjoying it, I mean – most of the time – but I am keen to get back down here. I don’t like to bring it up to him though. No point guilt-tripping him.’

‘Let’s make the most of it whilst you’re here then,’ Thomas said. ‘Addressing, of course, the most important thing first.’

‘And what’s that?’ Penny asked.

‘Did you really not have an orgasm?’

Penny held up her hands as if to say, nope.

Thomas put down his coffee and in a flash leapt onto the bed, dragging her with him.

‘Come here then!’ he screamed, and Penny squealed in delight.

They walked through London all day, the cold air making their cheeks rosy, stopping for hot chocolate and red wine and lunch and eventually dinner. They racked up twenty-five thousand steps and with every single one Penny felt herself get more and more nostalgic for the city that she missed all the way down to her bones. She felt free in London. It wasn’t anything to do with Havingley, or Derbyshire. It was everything to do with the fact that it wasn’t her choice to be there. The Red Panda wasn’t her choice. But to be in the place that felt most like home, for a few days, with Thomas, who was so good at adventure and making his own rules – well, it awakened something within her. It awakened a desire to regain control of her life, and to make her own rules, too. Francesco had said that’s what inspired him about her. It wasn’t like her to simply coast, and she had been. She didn’t like that. Thomas had helped her remember.

‘Listen, I want to tell you something,’ Thomas said, as, on Penny’s second night, they lingered by the Thames and darkness fell.

‘Tell me,’ said Penny, buzzed from the bottle of wine they’d just shared.