Lucas snorted. ‘Good question. No, I don’t mind, but only because it is you doing the asking and I brought the subject up – rare for me, I can assure you. The reason I did so was because I wanted…’ He scowled. ‘I wanted it known. By you.’ He blinked as he looked at her, his expression for a moment so guarded, so boyish, that Esther had a sudden vivid glimpse of the timid, bright-eyed child he must once have been. ‘My dear father is – was – a doctor. A GP. Trusted by the local community.’ His voice was sharp with scorn. ‘That thing about not being able to choose your families, it’s so true. But it doesn’t mean you have to hang out with them, right?’ He swivelled so that he was facing her properly, a sheepish grin suffusing his face like light. ‘Sob-story done with. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Esther murmured, still embarrassed at the pettiness of her own complaints, but touched at having been confided in. She found herself marvelling, too, that, for all the obviousness of the good looks of the man sitting beside her, she had been dead right about the underlying uncertainty in his demeanour. A smart talker, for sure, but with a kernel of shyness inside. It was endearing. It also made it tricky to know how to be, how to react…

‘I really like you,’ he blurted, plucking suddenly – with badly chewed nails she hadn’t noticed before – at a thread in the upholstery along the back of the sofa. He crossed one long leg over the other and then swung it awkwardly back to the ground. The thread grew and he snapped it off. ‘In fact, it is probably only fair to tell you, Esther…’ he seemed to hover on her name, rolling the word softly round his mouth ‘…that I have found it hard to stop thinking about you for… let me see now…’ He made a big show of tugging up the sleeve of the starchy, new-looking, dark-blue shirt – worn, possibly even purchased, in her honour, Esther realised – to consult the cheap, clunky, chain-linked watch on his wrist. ‘Four weeks, one day, three hours and twenty-one minutes. Hence the postcards.’

‘Hence the postcards,’ she echoed stupidly, adding, before she could stop herself, ‘though I have been wondering if you had changed your mind.’

‘Really? What a reckless and erroneous thing to wonder.’ A lilt had crept into his voice, a merriment. He had got his legs sorted and was edging closer.

‘I am with someone, remember?’ Esther groaned. ‘And not wanting to betray them… I am not like that, you see, Lucas. I am loyal. I am…’

He had stopped his edging and was staring at her, frowning in puzzlement. ‘Loyalty? To this Stephen Goddard? But surely you can see that the man betrays you. Every day. With his wife.’