‘She . . . backed me up. About what I told them. Where Mike was that night.’ He was with her, maybe, when I’d lost him for those few hours, the ones I’d lied about. Not all the time, she’d said the other night. What did that mean?

Cal was picking at a sliver of olive in his teeth. ‘What can she say after all these years? Mikey was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You helped him out, that’s all. I mean, Jesus, it was over twenty years ago!’

‘I bet Martha’s parents don’t see it that way,’ said Jodi, stacking plates. ‘They never found who did it, did they?’

‘No.’ But that wasn’t my fault. I’d just helped Mike avoid becoming a statistic. In the wrong place. No alibi. Last seen with her. Had I in reality helped cover up his cheating?

‘Sounds like Karen’s distraught,’ said Jodi. ‘I guess what happened, it brought back memories of all that. You remember?’

I remembered. I didn’t want to think about that pale hand, the white silk in the dirt. I turned instead to another worry. ‘Cal – did Mike ever talk to you about money?’ The two of them had stayed close since uni, meeting for lunch in town at least once a month. I’d felt jealous and cut off so many times, isolated in my country paradise. As if real life was going on somewhere without me.

Cal tore a hunk of pitta bread from the platter Jodi had set out, Parma ham draped artfully over olives, cheese, dips. She did everything so well. I thought of my abandoned, shattered party. The wine glasses filling up with rain. ‘Hmm. I don’t know. Something wrong?’

I told them about the money missing from the account, noticing the quick worried glance between them. My stomach fell. Maybe I was in worse trouble than I knew.

‘And you’ve no idea where it went?’ said Jodi, peering into her Le Creuset pot.

‘No. They’re saying the kids’ school fees haven’t been paid. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

Another silence, in which I felt them communicating, as Mike and I had been able to do, through some kind of couple’s telepathy. The space between, the webbed bands that held us together. Maybe cut now, for ever. I could not trust a thing Mike had said.

‘What about his parents?’ Callum sat down at the table, dripping hummus from another hunk of bread. Jodi tutted, wiped it away with a whisk of a cloth.

‘Mike’s? They maxed themselves out with their house in France.’ They’d made some bad investments, taken in by pyramid schemes. Needless to say, my mother had nothing. Mum. I knew I had to call her, sometime, but I was putting it off, thinking one day at a time. Not today. I’d spare myself that.