‘Yeah, good ole Marky-Mark was on good form tonight,’ he slurred. ‘Oliver made an excellent impression.’ The bed bounced as he fell back onto it, his shoes banging against the bedroom wall as he propelled them from his feet.

‘Could’ve taken them off in the bloody hallway, Brian.’

‘Shhh. Don’t be mad at me, Lou-Lou.’

Louisa tensed. Lou-Lou? He’d never called her that. She yanked the duvet up, turning away from him. She’d ignore it for now, put it down to drunkenness. It wasn’t often that Brian went out drinking, so she couldn’t really complain. He deserved to have some downtime – she just wished it hadn’t been with her ex-boyfriend, and husband to the missing woman. Oliver making a good impression suggested he was not playing the distraught, moping husband as people would surely expect in his situation. How was that going to do him any favours?

‘Well, you can tell me all about it in the morning, once you’ve sobered up.’

Louisa felt clumsy hands groping for her beneath the duvet. She closed her eyes. Not now. Since having Noah they’d only had sex once; she was just too tired and too disinterested. She was certainly long past having drunk sex, especially when only one of them was inebriated.

‘Go to sleep, love,’ she said. ‘We’ll only get disturbed by Noah crying anyway.’

‘Spoilsport. Oliver said you and him were at it like rabbits when you were together. But then, he is all manly and good-looking. You scraped the bottom of the barrel with me, didn’t you?’ His words, although slurred, clearly carried a hint of jealousy.

Louisa smarted. The thought of her husband and ex-boyfriend discussing their experiences of having sex with her was unbearable. She’d been seventeen when she’d first been with Oliver; it was all new and exciting. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. It was incomparable to her relationship now with Brian. Hadn’t they been at it like rabbits when they’d first got together though? Louisa reached back into her memory. Things had been very different with Brian, right from the start. Why had that been? She couldn’t remember. Whatever the reason, she didn’t want to be talking about it at almost two in the morning.

‘Shut-up, Brian, before you say something you can’t take back.’

He mimicked her words, childishly, before turning away from her. ‘Oliver was right about you,’ he mumbled into his pillow.

Louisa lay perfectly still, listening to her hammering heart – feeling the thud against her arm like a drumbeat. She wasn’t going to humiliate herself by asking what that meant.

But it was going to be a long, sleepless night spent worrying about it.