She had been going out with someone from work then. Clive, his name had been. And, yes, maybe he had been a bit of a stuffed shirt, but there had been no call for Will to talk about him that way. They had met, inevitably, at the reception after the service, and Alice had done her best to keep up a flow of increasingly desperate chit-chat as Will had eyed Clive and made absolutely no attempt to hide his contempt.

‘You’ve sold out, Alice,’ he told her later. ‘Clive is boring, pretentious and self-obsessed, and that’s putting it kindly! He’s not the man for you.’

They argued, Alice remembered, in the hotel grounds, away from the lights and the music, as the reception wore on into the night. Clive had too much to drink, and to Alice’s embarrassment was holding forth about his car and his clients and his bonuses. Depressed at her lack of judgement when it came to men, she slipped away, but, if she had known that she would encounter Will out in the dark gardens, she would have stuck with Clive showing off.

Will was the last person she wanted to witness Clive at his worst. She had been hoping to convince him that her life had been one long, upward curve since they had agreed to go their separate ways and that she was happily settled with a satisfying career, a stable home and a fulfilling relationship. No chance of him thinking that, when he had endured Clive’s boasting all evening.

Mortified by Clive’s behaviour, and tense from a day trying not to let Will realise just how aware she was of him still, Alice was in no mood for him to put her own thoughts into such brutal words.

‘What do you know about it?’ she fired back, glad of the dim light that hid her flush.

‘I know you, and I know there’s no way on earth a man like Clive could ever make you happy,’ said Will, so infuriatingly calm that Alice’s temper flared.