‘Hello, Esther. Nice to meet you.’ His northern vowels sounded stronger than they had during their two phone conversations, which had covered all sorts of promising ground from parenting challenging teenagers to a mutual enjoyment of crime thrillers. Spotting her, he had stepped forward at once, his right hand outstretched, the piercing dark-brown eyes, which had dominated the online picture, half disappearing among the crinkles of his smile.

‘You too.’ His grip was warm and firm. Esther smiled back without having to try, glad of her mother’s good teeth and Nordic blonde hair that hid the greys so well, and getting a flashback to the contrastingly awful limp, clammy handshake of Jim, the widowed violinist, two weeks before.

‘A widower! A musician! Ideal!’ Viv had cooed in the half-serious, half-joking way designed to boost the spirits of her oldest friend, while also reinforcing her frequently voiced, professional opinion that no woman – least of all Esther – needed a partner to ‘complete’ herself. This still-new venture into online dating should just be about enjoying herself, she had counselled, slipping into full psychologist mode – about making the most of this period of freedom while Dylan was on the post-A level visit to his father. Esther had dutifully agreed, managing not to say how easy that was for Viv to say, surrounded by steadfast Brian and their four vibrant, grounded children. She hadn’t mentioned either just how hollow her rented little home always felt without her rangy, maddening eighteen-year-old bounding round it; nor how visceral were the stabs of envy at the thought of Dylan loafing with Lucas in Cambridge instead, and having the luxury of Lily, his brainbox elder sister, just down the road, already throwing herself with typical Lily-like energy into life as a postgraduate.

‘It’s only a few weeks,’ Viv had added gently, detecting Esther’s misgivings in her uncannily brilliant way. ‘See it as a chance to really let your hair down, sweetheart; to start being all the things that husband of yours put a stopper on for twenty years.’

What things? Esther had wanted to ask, in danger these days of forgetting what it was she had lost touch with, what the hell she had been trying to get back to when Lucas’s behaviour finally tipped her into throwing in the towel after two decades.