We barely talked. We’d talked so much for weeks and weeks, and now we did all the things we’d wanted to do when we’d been talking. Kissing, touching, laughing, curling into each other and wrapping around each other and finding each other. When we did talk it was in whispers; it was hardly talking at all.

I slept, cocooned into his chest. When I woke up he was still there, the room was bright and white, and again I wondered if I’d died and gone to heaven, and then he was there and it happened all over again.

When he went to work I walked home. The cat-piss house smelled worse than usual, but I needed clean clothes and my own toothbrush. Marnie was asleep in her room and mine was a mess, postcards strewn all over the bed, and it seemed like so long since I’d looked at them. It seemed like another person had been there, lying in that bed and reading postcards and wishing for sleep. I picked them all up, put them back in their box. For the first time since it arrived, I picked up Bali from my bedside table and read it again. Lina sounded so excited. So happy. I could almost hear her. For the first time, it made me smile.

He came in that night, and the next night, and the next. I stopped counting, and the nights blended into one, broken up only by long lunch and dinner services, with Nic pestering me for details and Dex giving me strange, meaningful looks every time I went near the kitchen. I floated through them, making coffee and pouring wine and shaking martinis and waving cloths over benches.

Holly accosted me in the staffroom, asking for details, and my mouth tripped over the words when I tried to talk. ‘You’re so weird in a relationship, Caitie,’ she said. ‘All smiley.’

I laughed. ‘Sorry. It’ll probably wear off soon enough.’ But I couldn’t imagine it ever wearing off. I didn’t want it to.

And Tom was there, all the time. Everywhere, all around me, all the time, all in, and I didn’t want it to ever end.

18 TUESDAY, JUNE

18

TUESDAY, JUNE

‘This is perfect,’ I said. I’d been saying it a lot and I meant it every time, but I meant it the most lounging on Tom’s balcony under a blanket, with his arms around me, my back against his chest, looking at the city. The remains of dinner littered a low table in front of us; cheese, meats, olives, bread, an empty bottle of wine.