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‘Do me one favour, though. Can we not argue about it?’ he asked, holding his hands out to quieten me.

‘Who’s arguing? I’m simply asking you to explain yourself.’ I was not going to let him fob me off. ‘Go on,’ I prompted, tempted to put my hands on my hips like a disgruntled school marm.

‘OK.’ He took a sharp intake of breath. ‘It’s just that I could have guessed that about you.’

It was harder to make out his features now that the sun was sinking below the horizon and the sky was fast turning an inky blue. I looked for the stars and saw them twinkling into view, more and more of them as my eyes became accustomed to the lack of sunlight.

‘Guessed what?’ I asked.

I was sure I’d never talked to him about my childhood before, and knew for a fact I’d never mentioned my mum.

‘That you had this perfect, cozy childhood with perfect, loving, interested parents. It’s kind of . . . obvious.’

I stopped for a second, actually shocked. I was going to take back everything I’d said about him answering things thoughtfully and intuitively. There was nothing thoughtful about what he’d just said. He had no idea what my childhood had been like, no idea at all.

‘Is that really what you think?’ I asked him.

‘Well you’ve just described the idyllic mother/daughter scene. So yeah. I suppose.’

Maybe I should tell him how completely un-idyllic mychildhoodhadactually been, but now I didn’t feel like sharing anything with him at all.

‘You’re wrong about that, for your information,’ I said. ‘And don’t bother asking me any questions about it because I’m done with this task. I’ve got nothing more to say.’

I quickened my step, lengthening my stride. I didn’t care if he caught me up or not, in fact I’d rather he didn’t. Realising there was no point in me carrying on in this direction when the hotel was the other way, I stopped, swivelled and, giving him a wide berth, headed for the hotel and the safety of my room. I didn’t make eye contact with him but I could feel him watching me as I strutted past. Baffled, probably, but I didn’t care and also that was what happened when you were an arsehole to people. Idyllic indeed!

Of course his stride was twice as long as mine and he caught me up within seconds.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Scarlett,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed. I know nothing about your childhood, you’ve never talked about it.’

I walked faster, my breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

‘Exactly! So you’ve got no right to comment on it. That isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing here. You’ve made me feel really crap.’

‘Can we just rewind and start over?’ he asked hopefully.

I tutted. ‘You can’t un-say what you said.’

‘No, but I can explain.’

I slowed my pace a little, mainly because I couldn’t keep it up for much longer.

‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘And this had better be good.’

Seriously, I was done with this guy. How could I put my heart and soul on the line to write a book with this person who clearly couldn’t read people because if he could, he would have known that I hadn’t had one of those relativelyeasy upbringings that you heard about a lot in our industry: grammar schools, English Lit at a swanky uni, parents who paid for you to rent a flat in London while you pursued your dream of becoming an author. If he thought I was that, then he’d clearly never really got me at all.

‘My earliest memory is my mum and dad screaming at each other,’ said Theo, looking at the ground rather than at me. ‘Then Mum storming off to her room and slamming the door and Dad going out and not coming back until the following day. And me in my room on my own too scared to go out there in case I made whatever it was they were arguing about this time worse. So I read books. That’s what I did, I escaped into somebody else’s life.’

Other people had done this, then?

‘Right,’ I said.

‘And the reason I was so . . . snappy was because I feel kind of jealous, sometimes, when I hear how close people are with their parents and I realise that I never was and never will be.’

I nodded.

‘Did they get divorced then, in the end?’

Theo ran his hand through his hair. ‘They did. And then there was a custody battle from hell, which, honestly, felt like it was all about them getting one up on each other and not really about them both wanting me to live with them.’