‘Thirsty work, stretching out your lovely mum.’

It felt like he should be gone by now.

But he flopped his large body on the sofa, legs spread wide, can in hand.

‘Alone at last,’ Spike said.

‘There’s always Uncle Jack,’ I said, trying to pretend this wasn’t awkward. ‘And Maple.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Spike said, unsmiling. ‘Long time no see, Tara.’

That was true. When you lose your partner, you lose a network of shared friendships. All those double-dating nights, Christian and me, Spike and Ginger, – in restaurants before Marlon was born, from Deliveroo after he was born – were gone forever.

‘You look good, Tara.’

‘Spike?’

He waited.

‘Don’t flirt with me, OK? I’m not my mum. I don’t need you to compliment my Downward Facing Dog.’

He stroked his stubbled chin.

‘Me and your mother – now there’s a thought. Can’t be easy, having your husband inside for life. Got to be lonely. And of course it would even up the score with Ginger and your dear old dad.’

There was a nastiness to it that I felt I had never seen from him before. But that wasn’t quite true because then I remembered the night when Ginger had asked him to go to the hotel, to do to James Caine whatever he had done to her ex, Omar, yet another man who would not take no for an answer, and I recalled how Spike had looked at me that night. As if he could see right through me, as if he was seeing me for the first time – what an easy slut I really was and always had been.

The silence grew.

I glanced out of the big windows at the back of the house towards the empty field. Uncle Jack and Maple must be back at the stable. Spike was right then. We were alone now.

He sipped his beer, taking his time.

‘I’m not having sex with you, Spike,’ I said, smiling, to show him how absurd it was to even dream it.

He grinned.

‘Christian still with his child bride?’

‘That was a one-off, I think,’ I said, far more lightly than I felt, because it still hurt, and it was going to hurt for many years yet. Although the flirting between Christian and Skyla may have started under our roof, and maybe even the early kissing, the final betrayal was consummated at her little room in her shared flat and not in our home. That was Christian’s story, and I believed him. It had come out during one of the endless talks we had when at last I knew – those tear-sodden, heart-ravaged talks that lasted for hours, that last all night, those talks that make you feel as though you are being flayed alive.

Christian and Skyla didn’t do it in our home. They didn’t do it in our bed. They didn’t do it in the house where Marlon slept and played and grew. And all at once that was very important and didn’t matter a damn. It was important because knowing that they had been together in our home would have been a monumental act of disrespect and at the same time it didn’t matter a damn because all his promises to me were still broken.