‘Fun,’ he said, then smiled – a dazzling little smile. ‘I like camping.’

And I had the oddest sensation suddenly: like looking down into the bottom of an unknowable ocean.

‘Who’s this now?’ Hobbit-hands perked up as a silver sports car nosed its way down the track.

Only Melissa and I had taken the ‘No Vehicles’ sign to heart, it seemed, parking in the area just off the main road as we’d been told.

‘I spy fresh blood!’

‘Where’s blood?’ The boy’s face fell again – and I felt a shiver.

‘She doesn’t really mean blood, silly.’ Nella patted his head. ‘And this is the big surprise I promised you, Bek!’ For a woman as cool and gathered as Nella, the energy shift was palpable as she pinged her tiny shorts out of her bottom neatly. ‘Someone you’ve all been dying to meet!’

‘Ryan Gosling?’ squealed the redhead as the car pulled to a halt beside Marcus’s Tesla.

‘Oh, honestly, Rebekah!’ Nella gave a heavy sigh and heaved her boxes towards the campfire. ‘Even I couldn’t manage that. No, just have a look.’

‘I love surprises!’ She trotted after her friend to look in the car window. ‘Oh – wow!’

Melissa

Having found the bag of tent pegs in the boot of the car – which I could have sworn I’d put in my bag earlier but were actually wedged beneath Rex’s walking shoes, along with my Tarot cards – I stopped off for a few pulls on my vape.

I was getting very forgetful recently.

And the vape was so much nastier than a real cigarette, the vanilla flavour only reminding me of things I’d far rather forget; a candle Rex used to burn during our courting days when the world had been before me. Before I knew how fast my fertility was waning, or how loudly the bugle of perimenopause was about to sound in the distance.

‘You are still ovulating,’ the GP assured me. ‘There is a chance.’

So it must mean I was to be punished for the sins of my mother; the sins of myself. The latest being having taken another woman’s husband to bed.

God, what I wouldn’t do for a real cigarette right now. Rex would never have known.

And talking of God, perhaps he – or she – knew what the hell Ruby and I were doing here with this bunch of toffs I had literally nothing to say to. The writing had been on the wall, as Ruby had warned me, and I was cursing my own stupidity now. How could I ever have thought I could really be friends with someone I had put through their paces; made sweat and turn and bend in ways that probably weren’t natural but at least made me remember I was alive.

Nella and I weren’t meant to be friends just because she’d paid me to help her perfect a headstand – but in truth, it suited me to be involved with the party: it meant I could get out of the house more easily.