‘Is it because of him?’ Meaning: are you doing this to get back at Mike, Mike who screwed your best friend for years behind your back.

No, I said, into his mouth. No, no, no. And it was true. I wasn’t.

‘Ali,’ he said, as if meeting me for the first time. As if seeing me. Being naked with him felt familiar – even in the bed I shared with Mike, even with Benji and Cassie in their rooms nearby – as if we could finally say the things we hadn’t said for years. I’d forgotten how delicious that was, to talk of your past together with a lover. When you first saw each other. When you first realised. He said, ‘Do you remember, it was in the bar, and you had this T-shirt on with some cartoon on it . . .’

‘She-Ra.’

‘Yeah. And you looked around you like you were lost, and it was all, I don’t know, wonderful to you . . .’

‘It was. I grew up in Hull, remember . . .’

‘And I saw you come in. Right across the room I saw you.’

‘You remember that?’

‘Yeah. I remember everything.’

Other memories. ‘After the summer ball . . . you remember that?’

‘Of course.’ He turned over in bed, propping himself on an elbow so he could look at me. His chest was firm and muscled, where Mike had gone soft. I marvelled at the differences. Bill so tall his feet dangled over the edge of the bed. The different smell of him in the sheets. My hands shaping themselves around his shoulders, his ribs, his hip bones.

I remembered that night. Me and Bill running through the gardens, me barefoot in my taffeta silk, the skirts billowing. Dawn breaking on our bleary-eyed faces. No sign of Mike or Karen. ‘Did you want something to happen, that night?’

His long fingers traced patterns on my stomach. ‘I never thought it could. You and Mike. But I saw him with Karen, earlier, at the ball.’

I sighed. ‘I’m so stupid.’

‘No. You trusted them. Should I have told you?’

‘I don’t know. I might not have listened.’

‘What will you do?’ It was a wider question, I knew. The light was lifting in the bedroom, the grey of a summer dawn. It was a long time since I’d stayed up all night and it made me feel exhausted, and young, and reckless.

‘I have no idea. I just have to look after the kids right now.’

He flipped on his back, and I rested my head on his chest as if we’d been doing this for years. I could hear the thud of his heart beneath me. ‘It must be nice in a way. To know what you’re supposed to do. Your first priority. I’ve no idea what to do with myself now. I’m a forty-three-year-old man with no wife, no home, no job.’