But then he had shrugged off his jacket in one seamless movement, letting it lie where it fell, and she was in his arms, back where she was always supposed to have been. Everything was instinctive and urgent between them, words superfluous to touch, to taste, as they reclaimed one another again, trying to close the gap on the intervening years and compress the separation that had left her hollow and him, hungry.

His smell was like a comfort blanket over her, undoing all the pain and loneliness of the past four years, and as they fell into one another, again and again, she wondered how she had ever done what she had done to him, how she had had the strength to break what they had when clearly they were invincible.

She felt herself change as his hands moulded her, shaping her into someone better, brighter, happier, than she otherwise was and her heart thrilled as she heard his groans against her neck. This was a homecoming. This was destiny. This could never have been denied—

Doc Hall poured the brandy, a vinyl of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony wobbling around on the turntable, wood smoke puffing back into the small room in occasional downdraughts. The William Morris curtains were drawn but the window was ajar and intermittent shouts and carouses from the quad pierced the homely tranquillity of the tutor’s room. She was sitting on a gold velour pouffe, the fringing in one section held up by a safety-pin; Nathan was in the leather club chair on one side of the fire, Doc’s Burmese Grey, Mrs Miggins, sitting on the arm and swishing its tail in his face every few minutes. Ordinarily, it would have made her laugh – she loved to laugh; it was the only way not to cry as far as she could see – but she felt stoppered up by his presence, all her feelings tamped down, as if allowing one emotion would allow them all, an unstoppable force waiting to erupt from within her. She hadn’t expected him to be here in her tutorial. Had he asked to join it, specifically?

‘. . . all begs the overarching question, does History even matter?’ Doc Hall mused, handing them a drink each and sitting down heavily in the high-backed gentleman’s chair. He was a small, shrewish man, with a taste for three-piece tweed and leather buttons.

Charlotte couldn’t stop staring at Nathan, her eyes tracing how the firelight drew him in golden lines. He sat very upright, one hand on his thigh. He was wearing jeans and another jumper tonight, this one an old-school Aran, his face angled in the tutor’s direction but his eyes coming back to her every few seconds.

His gaze was inscrutable, the moment of clarity and understanding that had passed between them that day in the hall, a month ago now, increasingly distant. She couldn’t feel the connection she had felt back then and it made her feel foolish and embarrassed that a joke gone wrong had let him get so close. Why should she have thought he was different? Special? He was just a geek, a swot scholar who rocked a hand-knit. He would never fit into her world anyway. Her friends were sophisticated, worldly; they spent weekends in London and Christmases in Zermatt. He, on the other hand, travelled everywhere by bike and went home in the holidays to some remote village in the Midlands. For almost a month, she had pinned her hopes on finding and reconnecting with this enigmatic stranger but she had made him into something he wasn’t.