‘I was just watching the news,’ she said after a moment.

Torr shrugged off his overcoat, shaking raindrops on the tiled floor, and hung it up. ‘Have you got a minute?’

‘Of course,’ said Mallory, echoing his stiff, formal tone. They didn’t talk very often, but when they did they were always polite.

Charlie bustled into the sitting room behind Torr and flopped down on the rug in front of the fire, satisfied that his two favourite people were where he could keep an eye on them. There was something almost embarrassing in his evident pleasure at getting the two of them together.

It happened rarely enough. By unspoken agreement they had divided up the house into their private domains. This was Mallory’s room, in so much as any room felt like hers. The sitting room was beautifully decorated in soft, buttery yellows, the curtains at the large Georgian windows were spectacularly swagged and draped, and the furniture was covered in wonderful fabrics that she had chosen with an unerring eye for patterns that would complement each other without looking as if they had been carefully co-ordinated.

It was a lovely room, and she had been pleased with it when it was done, but it didn’t feel like home. Torr had just been a client when she had designed the scheme. Mallory had never dreamt at the time that she would end up living there herself, and in lots of ways she was as much an intruder here as in Torr’s large, comfortable study.

Since their disastrous wedding night they had had separate bedrooms, too. Mallory didn’t lock her door, but Torr had never set foot inside it. She wondered what he got out of their marriage. She had somewhere to live, and her debts paid in full, but Torr had just ended up sharing his home with a woman he didn’t even seem to like very much.

‘Sit down,’ she suggested, just as she would to a stranger, but Torr stayed looming by the fireplace.

With a mental shrug, Mallory chose an armchair and sat down herself, and then wished that she hadn’t.