How was it possible that the people who lived here were in their teens and twenties? The kitchen looked like something her mother would cut out of an interior-design magazine. Marble floor, pale grey walls, a huge island in the middle with a marble top and stools all around it. It was also, strangely, empty. Enjoying the feeling of being in the room, as if she were on the set of a film, she took two glasses from the cabinet then pulled open the door of the American-style fridge. A girl she had known at school had a fridge like that, with a door which made ice. She’d always made a point of letting them have a go with it at sleepovers.

The fridge was full of mineral water, champagne and Diet Coke, nothing as pedestrian as food. She pulled out a bottle of champagne and as she pulled off the foil around the top of the bottle she was grateful, for the first time in her life, that she’d spent two years working at the Sun and Mitre on the high road and so knew how to open it. Expertly, she twisted the cork from the bottle. It gave a low hiss as it came cleanly off, not a drop spilled over the neck.

A voice came from behind her. ‘Impressive.’ Startled, Chloe spun around, catching the bottle with her wrist and tipping it over on the counter. ‘Fuck!’ she yelped.

The boy was tall and broad-shouldered and had dark hair. His eyes were somewhere between green and brown and he looked – Chloe couldn’t find a better way to explain it – like a grown-up. The boys she had met so far, with their fleeces and trainers and stubby fingernails, had all seemed like children. But everything about this boy screamed adult, despite the fact that he couldn’t have been any older than twenty-one.

Smiling at her distress, he took a cloth from the side and threw it to her. ‘Usual house rules say that if you spill it, you have to lick it up. But seeing as you’re new here, I think we’ll make an exception.’

Chloe raised one eyebrow, trying to think of something smart to say, trying to ignore the fact that every single cliché from every book she had ever read was taking place underneath her ribcage. She put the cloth on top of the pool of champagne that was fizzing on the counter.