Faye watched him go. She was tired and longed to crawl into bed, to sleep and try again tomorrow. But she’d wait before following Derek, give him a chance to nod off. She didn’t want to make their friends uncomfortable. Or perhaps they’d dismiss Faye’s silence as Derek usually did: as yet another of her ill-humoured, gratuitous over-reactions to his “unique sense of humour.” It was, after all, how she’d defended Derek’s sarcasm in the early days.

An exchange with her mother, when the two of them met for lunch shortly after Faye and Derek announced their engagement, came to mind.

“What do you mean, ‘his comments can be biting’?” asked Faye. “It’s his wit; he’s sharp, as in clever. It’s what makes him interesting.”

Veronica laid down her cutlery and replied, with a tiny smile, “You know what they say about the thing that you most admire in a person when you first meet them becoming the thing that most annoys you over time, don’t you?”

Faye couldn’t remember how the conversation concluded. Just as she did not reveal her frustrations about her marriage to her friends, she never admitted to her mother that she’d been right about Derek. With Veronica dead for more than a year now, Faye wished she had mentioned it to her years previously. It might have helped to confide in her mother. It might have made her braver.

The light went off in the hut and Faye heard muffled murmurings as her friends and husband bade one another goodnight. She felt in her pocket for her torch. Had the others noticed she wasn’t there? Did Derek tell them she probably had her torch with her? Would he have bothered?

Despite the glittering stars, smear of the Milky Way, splinter of moon and the dim glow of the sun behind a mountain range in the distance, the night was darker than Faye was accustomed to. It was entirely black where the massifs met the trees.

With darkness came the clatter of frogs rising above the sound of the stream. The rattling reminded Faye of the noise she and the other six- or seven-year-olds had made as they scampered across a wooden floor to begin tap lessons. Back then, the sound of her tap shoes legitimised her as a dancer, despite how her tapping typically lagged everyone else’s. She’d told Derek about the lessons when she was still giddy with young love.

“I wish I’d known you then,” he’d said, rearranging a stray lock of hair that had escaped from behind her ear. “I’d have watched you dance through the window.”

How she’d loved him for the thought.