Catrin glared at her.

‘Oh yeah!’ said Judith, oblivious to Catrin’s awkwardness. ‘And it’s weird, ’cos you wouldn’t think Eryl the Smack would own a strimmer, y’know.’

Catrin was mortified by the impression her friends were creating. She looked at Sol. What must he be thinking?

‘I dunno, Jude,’ he said, straight-faced. ‘Just ’cos someone’s a heroin addict doesn’t mean they’re a bad gardener.’ There was a pause, then he smiled. Lana and Judith burst out laughing, unexpectedly warming to him. And Catrin felt her skin tingle.

As they set off on the rest of the hike, Sol and Catrin naturally put distance between themselves and Lana and Judith, who were not the fastest of movers. But Catrin was glad. Because all she wanted to do was walk with Sol along the gorge, talk to him, stumble on another rock so she had an excuse to lean on him, and talk to him some more.

When they reached the abandoned village of Samaria, they walked around its ruins and stroked the curious Kri-kri goats who’d made the place their home. There were benches and shade there, so Catrin chose a seat and took out her packed lunch. ‘You not hungry?’ she said to Sol, who sat, hands in his empty lap.

‘Absolutely starving,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t have time to buy anything.’

She smiled, and placed her share of the picnic feast between them. ‘Dive in,’ she said, and he began devouring the Greek bread before she had time to say ‘taramosalata’.

An hour later, they passed a place where people were building little pyramids out of small stones, as they whispered their secret wishes and prayers. Not wanting to miss out, Catrin and Sol built their own, though neither of them shared with the other what they were wishing for, both confessing that their Catholic guilt still made them feel weird about doing anything vaguely pagan like that. They were seven hours into the hike and Catrin knew this would soon all be coming to an end.

Walking through the narrow cutting known as the Gates, they stretched out their arms laughingly to prove how little space there was between the two megaliths. ‘They’re like two giant security guards,’ Catrin said, ‘escorting us off the premises.’

‘That’s so true!’ Sol laughed. ‘Hey, pass us your camera.’ And he took several shots of her posing – the filling in the mountain sandwich. But before he handed it back, he stopped a fellow hiker and said, ‘Excuse me, mate, will you take one of the two of us?’ Just hearing him say the two of us made her melt and she never wanted that photographically snatched moment to end, as the joyous image was captured on film, their arms thrown around each other’s shoulders in a display of newly discovered friendship.

When they untangled themselves from the pose and Catrin took back her camera, there was a tiny and silent exchange between them. It was only a look. But in that look pulsed a million heartbeats. And they both knew this was so much more than just friendship.