“Fine, well then tonight let’s just do dares,” Veronica grinned. “You go first.” She abandoned her knots and pulled her towel closer around herself, looking at Sarah with an air of excited defiance. “But it has to be hard.”

“Okay,” said Sarah. “Okay…”

More clicking of Veronica’s toes punctuated ticking seconds. “Come on,” she sighed.

“Okay. Okay, I dare you… to go outside on your own, and stand on the deck for thirty seconds—”

“Hard, Sarah,” Veronica admonished.

“Naked,” finished Sarah. “And you have to leave your towel inside.” She giggled. “And you have to do thirty seconds of our Bon Jovi dance.”

Now Veronica giggled too. “Aw, really?”

“Yep. That’s the dare,” Sarah nodded. “Off you go.”

Veronica held her towel tight to her chest, but stood up. Together they opened the TCR door and trod carefully through the changing room. Veronica opened the door to outside and put one foot on the deck.

“You have to leave the towel inside,” Sarah reminded her.

Veronica sighed dramatically, but nodded assent. “Leave the door open,” she ordered. And in an instant, she had thrown her towel at Sarah’s feet, leapt into the darkness and begun shimmying across the deck to the silent Bon Jovi beat.

Sarah bent double with laughter. Flashes of white limbs darted past the doorframe. In and out of shadows Veronica’s bareness moved. From the darkness, Sarah heard Veronica stub her toe. She looked at her waterproof watch. “Ten more seconds!” she called between giggles. She saw Veronica crouch down in the move she knew preceded the cartwheel into the chorus. Legs flailed. And, all of a sudden, Sarah felt a strange guilt, and pleasure, in watching. The next moment, Veronica was in the doorway, hands dramatically covering her privates, grabbing her towel from the floor. “Your turn,” she grinned.

The tightening in Sarah’s stomach caught her by surprise, but she didn’t show it to Veronica. “Go on then,” she challenged. “What do I have to do?”

Veronica turned towards the pool, mulling slowly. “You have to go back in,” she declared after a while. “And you have to go under the cover, all the way to the end—”

“It’s pitch-black,” Sarah interrupted.

“I’m not finished. We’re going to put the underwater light on—”

“Someone will see.”

“They won’t. You have to touch the end, then swim back and do a handstand in the water. And you have to be naked and leave your towel here.”

“That’s so much worse than yours,” Sarah complained.

“Not my fault. You could have said anything.”

Sarah shook her head disapprovingly, but there was a knot of excitement in her chest and she already knew that she was going to do it. “Put the light on then,” she said.

Sarah’s phone beeped again, snapping her out of her reverie. David: Hope session good. Love you x

Sarah smiled, but she didn’t reply, the nausea persisting.

It had been years since she had thought about Veronica. When she’d seen her at Amelia’s school that Monday, despite over a decade cultivating the kind of composure that saw her dubbed one of the UK’s fastest rising barristers, she was wholly unprepared for the jolt, and for the entire drive home, she hadn’t heard a thing that Amelia had said to her. Every day since, she had found her mind going back to that moment – seeing Veronica – and thinking about how David was having lots of such moments, seeing Veronica, and engaging in private conversations with her. And now, agreeing to dinner.