Sadly, Alice was by nature as critical and prickly as Beth was sweet and kind. She settled herself more comfortably on her lounger, resting an arm over her eyes and resigning herself to one of her friend’s breathless accounts of someone Alice had met for five minutes several years ago, and who she had most likely hoped never to see again.

‘I give up,’ she said.

At least she wouldn’t have to pay much attention for the next few minutes. Beth’s stories tended to be long, and were often so muddled that she would get lost in the middle of them. All Alice would be required to do was to interject an occasional ‘Really?’ or the odd ‘Oh?’ between encouraging murmurs. ‘Who did you meet?’ she asked dutifully.

It was the cue Beth had been waiting for.

‘Will Paxman,’ she said.

Alice’s eyes snapped open. ‘What?’ she demanded, jerking upright. ‘Who?’

‘Will Paxman,’ Beth repeated obligingly. ‘He was a friend of Roger’s from university…Well, you must have known him, too, Alice,’ she went on with an enquiring look.

‘Yes,’ said Alice in a hollow voice. ‘Yes, I did.’

How strange. She had convinced herself that she’d forgotten Will, or at least succeeded in consigning him firmly to the past, but all it had taken was the sound of his name to conjure up his image in heart-twisting detail.

Will. Will with the quiet, serious face and the stern mouth, and the disconcertingly humorous grey eyes. Will, who had made her heart jump every time he’d smiled his unexpected smile. He had asked her to marry him three times, and three times she had said no.

Alice had spent years telling herself that she had done the right thing.

She felt very odd. The last four years had been consumed by Tony, and she’d been braced for memories of him, not Will. Ever since Tony had left, she had done her best to armour herself against the pain of if onlys and what might have beens, to convince herself that she had moved on, only to be ambushed now by the past from quite a different direction.