‘Doesn’t Mama look pretty?’ Christian said.

Marlon considered me in my white strapless dress.

‘She looks like an angel.’

Christian smiled proudly.

The phone was still demanding my attention and I was still pretending I couldn’t hear it. Christian’s warm, open smile began to dissolve.

‘Do you want to get it?’ he said.

‘Quick work thing,’ I said, slowly reaching inside my bag. ‘You two go in.’

James Caine was calling more frequently now.

I had blocked his mobile number but he was using other phone lines that told the little lie – Unknown Caller. I knew my caller all too well. He left silent messages but sometimes I could hear him breathing on voicemail, Classic FM in the background, sounding like his patience was wearing thin. Every morning I expected to see him sitting in reception at work. Every night I expected to find him standing on our doorstep. All the time – and I do mean all the time – I was waiting for my life to fall apart.

But tonight was different because tonight there was a text message from my known caller.

It’s not safe.

I felt my stomach fall away. I read it again. What wasn’t safe? Did he mean that our secret wasn’t safe? Or the sex wasn’t safe? But the sex had been safe, I thought. He had used a condom. In fact, he had used three condoms. I remembered the self-conscious pause for protection, worth it because of the unstated promise that this would make it all cost free, pain free, that this would make it safe. Not safe? I remembered the two times before we slept and the third and final time in the first light of morning, and I remembered feeling desired – physically craved, as if a man was starving for me – like I had not been desired for a long time.

And I felt that way right up until I was brushing my teeth with one of the hotel’s complimentary toothbrushes and I saw, next to the heavy Rolex Submariner, the green and cream packet of Cialis poking out of his washbag. I didn’t even know what they were and then I read the label and I did. They were pills to make a man harder. To make a man want you more. So it was never real desire. It was the pills doing what they were made to do. Even James Caine’s passion was a lie. I read his message again.

It’s not safe.

‘Tara?’

I shoved my phone in my bag and stared dumbly at three guests who were arriving at the party. Two men and a woman. A prosperous husband-and-wife combo and a man who could conceivably be homeless. The larger of the men, the one with the woman, had a shaven head and a good suit.

The woman with him was attractive but erring on the side of tarty, heels a touch too high for a sixtieth birthday party, the skirt way too short. The other man had a faded attraction about him, as if he had been fresh-faced once but had lost his looks to serious illness, or serious drugs, or both. I had never seen the woman before but I knew the men from my teenage years. The sight of them made me smile with real pleasure.