Then she abruptly quit and turned to me. ‘I just can’t care any more,’ she said.

‘Because you can afford not to care,’ I said angrily. ‘But I have a family to support.’

She shook her head.

‘I didn’t want to hurt us,’ she said. ‘That was never the plan. All I wanted was to meet someone nice – that’s all. Someone like Christian. A guy like that. A good man.’ Her face frowned at the mention of his name. ‘But someone like Christian doesn’t want someone like me, Tara. They want someone like you. Even that photographer – he didn’t want me in the picture, did he? On that day. He wanted you.’

It took me a moment to realise that she was talking about the photo shoot in our early days, when that magazine was doing a piece on dating apps, and I ended up on the cover because the photographer and his assistant thought a solo shot of me was a better look.

‘You think I cared about being on their stupid cover?’ I said. ‘That stuff is all totally meaningless!’

‘Yes, it’s so meaningless that you had the cover framed and stuck on your wall in your home, Tara.’

She stood up and I realised with a stab of panic that she was leaving me, and leaving the company, and I knew that I would struggle to run Angel Eyes without her.

‘Mary,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve felt undervalued and unappreciated. By me, and by these creeps you’ve been dating and writing about, and by that fucking photographer all those years ago.’ I could not believe we were talking about a dumb photo shoot from the distant past but I saw that was where it began, the hurt she had been cultivating for all these years. ‘I wish I had walked out of that shoot if he didn’t want the pair of us on the cover.’

‘Then why didn’t you, Tara? Come on – you agreed with him – it was a better cover with fat old Mary kept out of the picture.’

‘Mary – please don’t go. This place revolves around you.’

‘Thank you for saying that but it’s too late.’ She touched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You’re spoilt, Tara. You’ve been loved from the start by so many people. You’ve always got whatever you wanted. You were the little girl with a horsey in her back garden. You were so loved by your parents—’

‘Have you met my mother?’

‘Your dad, then, although I am sure your mum loves you in her own way. Everyone loves you! Christian, certainly, my God, and every boy and man you ever met since you were about fourteen, and me and everybody at Angel Eyes. Skyla, Michael. When we met – when we first got chatting at that magazine – I was so proud to be your friend, Tara! It was like having the sun coming out when you were around. What’s it like to be that loved, Tara? To be so indulged, to be so valued? You’ve had so much. Don’t you see? But you took it all for granted, you were careless with it, you got a bit bored. All of it. And I think that when someone is loved as much as you are, they start thinking that being loved is the natural order of things. And believe me – it’s not, Tara. You’re not a bad person, Tara, I know that. But you’re spoilt rotten and, in the end, you’ve let everyone down. Those men – I should not have had to suffer all those humiliations, not if you were really my friend. If you were there for me. But you take the love that is given to you and you spit it back in our faces.’