Which she didn’t. Not really.

Slipping her feet into the gaudily decorated flip-flops she had bought at the airport at great expense, Alice bent to adjust one of the straps and let her straight brown hair swing forward to cover her face.

‘You know, Will and I went out for a while,’ she said as casually as she could.

‘No!’ Beth’s jaw dropped. ‘You and Will?’ she said, suitably astounded. ‘Roger never told me that!’ she added accusingly.

‘We’d split up long before he met you.’ Alice gave a would-be careless shrug. ‘It was old news by then. Roger probably never gave it a thought.’

‘But you were both at our wedding,’ Beth remembered. ‘I do think Roger might have mentioned it in case I put you on the same table or something. I had no idea!’ She leant forward. ‘Wasn’t it awkward?’

Unable to spend any more time fiddling with her shoe, Alice groped around beneath her lounger for the hair clip she had put there earlier.

‘It was fine,’ she said, making a big thing of shaking back her hair and twisting it carelessly up to secure it with the clip, all of which gave her the perfect excuse to avoid Beth’s eye.

Because it hadn’t been fine at all. There would have been no way she’d have missed Roger’s wedding, and she had known that Will would be there. It had been two years since they had split up, and Alice had hoped that the two of them would be able to meet as friends.

It had been a short-lived hope. Alice had been aware of him from the moment she’d walked into the church and saw the back of his head. Her heart had jerked uncomfortably at the sight of him, and she had felt ridiculously glad that he was wedged into a pew between friends so that she wouldn’t have to sit next to him straight away.