Deciding to have a drink first, eat later – and she would eat tonight, she promised herself – she poured herself a glass and slumped against the kitchen cabinets. The apartment door was locked and she was done with today. It had started badly and limped along from there. She raked her mind over her meetings with Mateo, Lucy, Marina, her scratchy call with Stephen . . . All frustrating and draining in various ways. Had there been any positives? She forced herself to think. Dr Ferrante was available; that, at least, was helpful. Anything else?

But it was hopeless trying to pretend. Hangover or not, her day had never had a chance of recovering from the sight of the Chardin in the Prado. She had felt winded by it, blown off her path by the abrupt reappearance of this memento from another life, as though her past was knocking at the door and demanding to be let in.

Throwing her head back, she drained the glass and poured another, walking through the kitchen, past her woven leather Loewe bag strewn over the dining table with the purse about to slip out, her shoes kicked off and lying on their sides in the middle of the floor. Already she was making the place look untidy, her messy life beginning to disrupt.

Standing at the balcony, she looked down over the city as she had the night before. Ostensibly, nothing had changed: the sun still shone at the same oblique angle, dazzling her as it sliced around the grand neo-classical buildings on the opposite side of the street; the traffic still flowed below her feet up the wide boulevards and out of sight. But she had – only by a few degrees, but her past had come back into her life today as surely as light through an open door. The painting hanging there was an ending thrown at her like a stick, and it hurt. Still. After all this time.

Her phone rang and she answered listlessly. ‘Hello?’

‘Lotts, it’s me,’ her sister drawled. ‘What the actual fuck? Ma says you’re in Madrid.’

‘That’s right. Something came up at work.’

‘So what about our dinner then? That’s just off is it?’

‘Huh?’ Charlotte frowned, before suddenly remembering. ‘Oh God! I’m so sorry!’

‘For standing me up in the bloody Ritz? Yes, I should hope you are. I’m sitting here right now, on my own, looking like a complete fucking numpty.’

Charlotte sincerely doubted that. Her sister had an innate ability to look completely at home wherever she went, and right now the concierge would be wondering if he’d made a wrong turn to work this morning and was in fact standing in the middle of her house.

‘I just completely forgot. I rearranged the dress fitting for Friday night and . . . ugh, it totally slipped my mind about dinner.’

‘Charming. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all week.’

‘Me too!’

‘Liar.’

‘Look, it’s all just gone a bit crazy, that’s all. This project came up last minute for a client and there’s been back-to-back meetings since getting here, blah-blah-blah. I just haven’t been able to give anything else the mental space. I’m so sorry.’