‘I mean, obviously. But there’s nothing I can do from here, is there? She’s a good dog. I just hope she doesn’t try to cross any roads or anything. Surely somebody would see a little thing on her own and look at her dog tag? Or if she didn’t have her collar, they really would take her to the vet’s?’

‘Exactly,’ he agreed. And then: ‘Hug?’

‘Okay.’

Patrick wrapped his thick, strong arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head as I pressed my cheek into his bare chest. He was warm from the sun, and smelt like coconut. He rubbed my back and I sent a little prayer up to the doggy gods to keep Carol safe, and get her home as soon as possible.

‘Carol will come back to you,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Like Maktub.’

‘I’ve never heard that name before,’ I replied. ‘Maktub.’

‘It’s not really a name,’ he explained. ‘It’s a saying. It’s Arabic for it is written. Sort of a nod to fate. Everything was meant to happen because we were always supposed to be here,’ he said. ‘It was all designed to lead us up to this precise moment.’

‘Maktub,’ I repeated again, still pulled into his chest. ‘I like that. Do you still have him?’

‘Jess and Mark have him, now. They’re retired, so he gets better company with them.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Keep the faith, okay?’

I tugged away from the hug, believing that if Patrick said Carol would be all right, she would be. He dipped to kiss my cheek, doing it with such tenderness that I instinctively reached up to touch where his lips had been. I held my hand there, suspended, before letting my fingers drift back down to my side. He’d already turned away from me to grab a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl we’d been gifted, as if what he’d done was nothing.

It is written, I thought, as he bit into an apple, watching the way his hand wrapped around it, how a tiny speck of juice landed on his bottom lip.

It took me ages to get to sleep that night. I lay in the dark replaying the day. I thought about the way Patrick wore his checked shirt with two buttons undone on the way to the beach, but with three buttons undone on the way home, a sliver of toned stomach on show through the gap. I tried to remember how close I’d stood to him when I’d put suntan lotion on his back. Had I been an arm’s length away? Or had I been the measure of my own breath, close enough to feel the rise and fall of his body as he inhaled and exhaled?