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‘Mind if I join you?’

It was, of course, Theo, sounding more sure of himself than I felt. But then, lack of confidence had never been his problem. Quite the opposite, one might say.

‘Fine by me,’ I said, making myself glance up to prove that I could look at him without spontaneously combusting.

He slid into the seat opposite and despite being determined to keep my cool, for a second I was thrown. I’d forgotten about his luminous brown eyes with flecks of what seemed like gold if you caught them in the right light, and how it felt when he looked at you close up. Like your insides were being turned into hot maple syrup, basically, whichcouldbe pleasurable, but definitely wasn’t in this scenario. I pulled the end off my croissant and shoved it in my mouth, trying to remember how to chew normally and instead feeling all ungainly, like a cow chewing the cud. Flustered, I poured myself a glass of water from a jug, spilling some on the tablecloth because it came out about ten times faster than I’d expected.

‘Shit,’ I said, frantically mopping it with a napkin.

Theo raised his eyebrows at me. Trust him to try to make me feel as embarrassed as possible.

‘Water?’ I asked breezily.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Preferably in my glass.’

I scowled at him and poured some into his tumbler, more successfully this time, but it took extreme concentration.

‘Carla called me this morning,’ he said, cutting into his own croissant.

His legs were so long that when he leaned forward to pick up the pot of butter, his knee brushed against mine under the table. I scraped my chair back an inch or two. That couldn’t happen again.

‘Let me guess,’ I said, ‘she wanted to reiterate that the couples retreat could be good for our writing careers?’

‘I told her she was wrong, of course,’ said Theo.

‘Obviously,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t seem like we’ve got much of a choice, though, does it?’ he said.

I hid my surprise. ‘So you’re saying we should do it?’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose we could see how it goes. And at the same time we can start hashing out the beginnings of our story idea. If you’re up for doing that, still,’ he said.

‘Doing what? Writing a book together?’

‘What else would I be talking about?’

‘Just checking,’ I said, my cheeks beginning to redden.

Honestly, why was I acting like this? I tried to channel how I’d conducted myself when I’d first met him. It had been seven years ago, on the first evening of our creative writing for beginners class. I’d come straight from typing up medical letters about people’s failing kidneys. My life was not going well, although possibly better than it was for the aforementioned renal patients whose notes I’d been filing. I’d graduated from university with a pretty useless mediadegree four years earlier and had struggled to find a job that I was passionate enough about to compete with a hundred other graduates for. I’d kidded myself that if I temped for a bit, just to make ends meet, at some point the penny would drop and I’d know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and my real career would begin. But the only thing I kept going back to was that I wanted to be a writer, and that hardly seemed realistic. I wasn’t the sort of person who wrote a novel and got it published, I was far too ordinary and unglamorous and unlucky. But I’d finally got so fed up with being stuck in an office typing letters all day that on a whim I’d booked myself a place on the course, in July, so September had seemed far enough away, but suddenly it was about to start and I felt utterly unprepared and a bit of an imposter. I’d been good at English at school, and had loved writing essays and dissertations at uni (much better than having to give presentations or speak up in class) but this felt different. Creative writing . . . was I even a creative person?

The class had been small, with twelve of us altogether, plus the tutor, and Theo had been the last to arrive. I remembered nervously getting out my pad and pen, poised to write extensive notes because I knew I would be way too overwhelmed to take everything in. I was one of the first to look up when Theo breezed into the class and so I observed everyone sort of stopping what they were doing and brazenly staring. Whereas Iwasn’tthe type of person to write a book, he was everything you’d imagine a novelist to be: tall and beautiful and a little bit cocksure, with a twinkle in his eye and a trendy rucksack on his back and wearing black jeans with a black roll-neck jumper, already looking like an author in the making. I knew immediately that he’d be a good writer, and I also knew that I was not going to fawn all overhim like all the other women (and some of the men) in the group were clearly going to. I generally found it was much safer to focus on things I could control, rather than let my head be turned by good-looking men who had the capacity to throw me off track in a second. I was here to learn how to write a book and I would not be distracted by this annoyingly handsome guy and his luscious head of shiny hair and his ludicrously perfect eyebrows that looked as though they’d been professionally shaped. That evening, I caught him looking at me a couple of times with a sort of confused look on his face. Presumably, he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t as desperate for his attention as everyone else.

I watched Theo now, still as handsome as he was then, more so if anything. He hadn’t even had the decency to grow the beginnings of a beer belly in the years since I’d seen him last, and he didn’t have a single grey hair. I pushed my hair behind my ears, wondering how I looked to him. Whether he thought I’d aged. Whether it mattered if he did.

We ate our breakfast in silence for what felt like far too long before I decided to make some attempt to break the ice.

‘What have you been up to, then?’ I came up with. I was nothing if not original.

‘What, for the last six years?’ he replied.

What was with the little digs? Anyway, it was his fault that we hadn’t seen each other, not mine. I swallowed it. I thought back to something my friend’s mum had said to me once, when we’d all gone to the park and I’d taken Kate and Zach and they’d run me ragged, refusing to do a single thing I’d asked them to.Pick your battles, she’d said, and it had stayed with me. Nothing like being given parenting advice at eleven years old.

‘Your books are doing well,’ I said, sticking to safe territory.

‘They’re not, and you know it, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

I popped a cherry tomato into my mouth. That was me told.