For three weeks, she lost sight of him. Though she went to all the usual parties, clubs, pubs, hangouts, her eyes searched for him wherever she went – scanning as she walked down corridors and across quads with her glamorous social set for that diffident blonde boy in the hand-knitted sweater.

It was only after she’d been spirited away that she had realized she didn’t even know his name, although it had been easy enough to find out.

‘Oh you mean Nathan Marling,’ one of the girls in her Indian Democracy module had drawled, sweeping mascara onto her lashes. ‘He’s a supervisor in my Fascism class. Fucking oddball. I am not joking, he actually sits in lectures with a fucking apple on his desk. I mean, who even does that?’

‘Right,’ Charlotte had murmured, thinking it was charming. That bitch was right – who else did do that?

When she’d found him again, it was in the one place she hadn’t thought to look – lying on the banks of the river with Jules and their gang, drinking champagne from teacups and not even pretending to revise, her head had turned, bored, at the collective splash of blades sluicing the river Cam, the slash of wooden seats sliding back on their rails, the heavy breathing of eight men moving in unison, muscles flexed and taut . . .

His hair gave him away instantly and she froze as the boat lunged past in ten-metre increments, the cox huddled in the stern and shouting instructions through a cone. He was the stroke, first in the boat, the one all the others looked to for speed, pace and beat, and as the boat passed by their rowdy group, his unseeing gaze found her. She saw the slap of shock on his face as their eyes locked, but he didn’t miss a beat; he kept the rhythm, sliding back and forth, pushing through the pain, pulling himself away from her until within a minute, he was out of her sights again—

‘Another drink?’ she asked.

‘Yes. But not here.’ His gaze was level, but entirely different in tone to that of a moment earlier. Nothing more needed to be said. Or explained.

And in that instant, she felt the world settle back into place. ‘Let’s go then.’

She didn’t even know the name of the hotel. He had grabbed her hand and run with her, pulling her through the traffic on Gran Via and across the road to an historic building opposite. There, they had stood at reception and booked a room, trying to look contained as they waited for the paperwork, their eyes on the ceiling as they rode up in the escalator with the poor porter who had nothing to carry but their key. It was the middle of the afternoon, they were dressed for business meetings, they had no bags . . . everyone knew what this was.

He didn’t bother showing them how to work the TV or explaining the thermostat in the bathroom, merely handing them the key with an embarrassed nod and beating a hasty retreat. For one moment, alone at last, they had stood in front of one another, neither one of them bothering to take in the view at the window or check the toiletries or the minibar. Their eyes were glued on one another, their breathing shallow, eyes bright like they’d run up the stairs.