Except she’s nearly fifteen years younger than me, and I’m hardly a sex symbol: more Gérard Depardieu than Timothée Chalamet. Even if I didn’t love my wife, I’m not that much of an old fool. Whatever daddy issues Harper has going on, a fling with me isn’t going to solve her problems.

‘You were really nice to me at the gala,’ she says earnestly. ‘You didn’t have to be. Everyone else looked down their noses, but you treated me like I was just as good as them. No, they did,’ she adds, as I start to protest. ‘It’s OK, it doesn’t bother me. I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing it for my boys. I want them to have a better start than I did, you know?’

‘I do know,’ I say.

‘Kyle thinks we shouldn’t get above ourselves,’ Harper says, pulling a face as she draws quotes in the air around the words. ‘He thinks if something was good enough for us, it should be good enough for our kids.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I’ve been hustling my whole life and what I do, it’s not a great career but it’s not nothing,’ she says. ‘I want more for the boys. Good schools. Connections. Maybe they won’t turn out to be very clever, but if they are, I want them to feel like they can be anything they choose. Lawyers and doctors and that.’

‘Is that what you wanted? To be a doctor?’

She picks up her mug of coffee, and wraps both her hands around it. ‘I grew up in a car,’ she says, after a long moment. ‘Well, a few cars, really. Sometimes a van, depending on what Mum’s latest boyfriend was driving. Now and then we’d wind up in a shelter or a B&B, and I’d go to school for a few weeks. Once, I even made it through an entire term.’ She puts the mug back down on the counter without drinking from it. ‘I didn’t have friends, because we were never in one place long enough. Mum killed herself when I was fifteen, and my dad was an addict who OD’d before I was even born. I’m not telling you because I want you to feel sorry for me,’ she adds quickly. ‘But maybe if things had been different, I could’ve got some exams. I could’ve been different.’

I guess that explains the daddy issues. She and Millie have more in common than I imagined: parental addiction, neglect, suicide – Millie’s mother took the better part of two decades to starve herself to death after her dad died, but her story ended in the same place as Harper’s mother’s.