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their families. Cyn hadnodded brightly, smiled a lot, said oh yes, it was the same for her, back to real life and all that, time to move on.
    â€˜No hard feelings,’ she’d said and they’d giggled at that. It was entirely painless. Or so he’d thought. It turned out Cyn had thought otherwise. How could he not have read the signs? The overbright glitter in her eyes, that loud clunk as she placed her glass a bit too hard down on the table.
    Looking back, it had been a falsely secure lull. After a couple of weeks the phone calls had started: ‘Just to see how you are.’ Then she’d wanted to meet, ‘Just as friends’, then, when he’d quietly suggested that a complete break might be best, she had started on the late-night calls with nobody speaking. A quick check with 1471 had shown up her mobile number, as she knew it would, but he hadn’t called back. Finally there’d been the birthday fiasco when he’d opened the mystery parcel in front of Beth, who had sat at the table holding her piece of toast halfway to her mouth, suddenly rigid as a statue and her wide, unblinking eyes full of new and painful knowledge she absolutely didn’t want.
    Beth had shaken the whys (midlife panic: pathetic excuse but there it was) and the whens (during a couple of months, back in spring) out of him. The only lie left was the ‘who’. There was nothing to be gained, and a lot of pain to be inflicted, by telling too much truth; so he’d lied, insisted to Beth it had been no-one she knew, a stupid mistake, barely more than a one-off, someone he’d met from work, a colleague on a work exchange who’d gone back to South Africa and wasn’t about to reappear. Ever. Cyn and Bradley were off to Mauritius or the Seycelles this year, he couldn’t recall which. The opposite direction, anyway – they wereprobably already there, a safe half a world away. Thank goodness.
    The thing that was nagging at Ned now was whether to believe that Cyn hadn’t told anyone who
would
be there. She had promised she never would, sworn on her Asprey’s emerald earrings that she hadn’t e-mailed so much as a hint to Lesley or Gina. But . . . but . . . once, after one of their back-seat sessions in Oxshott woods, rutting like teenagers and challenging the sedate Audi’s traumatized suspension, she’d confessed that part of the fun of the naughtiness was whispering hints and confidences to your female circle, just for the thrill of seeing that envious greedy gleam in their eyes.
    He’d know, of course, as soon as he set foot in the Sundown bar that night, if she’d let anything drop. His great dread was that she’d told them all, in lurid detail, as some kind of long-distance revenge. There they’d be, the women in their annual party: Lesley, Gina from Connecticut who always came by herself, and the tall bony woman whose husband played golf all day (what was her name? Hilary? No, Valerie) staring at him and appraising curiously, then glancing at Beth with that pity expression that women kept for victims of marital shenanigans.
    If he could cross more than his fingers he would – he so wanted this holiday to be all right, although it could be tricky with the small spanner in the works that was Delilah. How was he supposed to rekindle the sparks of romance with Beth across a softly lit table beneath the bougainvillea, with a moody teenager sitting between them playing gooseberry?
    â€˜You always say the same thing, Mum. You always say it at least three times,’ Delilah was murmuring. ‘Such a
paranoia freak
.’
    Don’t let her get to you, Beth told herself, just
breathe
.
    So what if Delilah had a point? So what if Beth always had to come over all head-prefectish and say, ‘Now, you have all got your passports, haven’t you?’ Why couldn’t the girl just laugh it off with a trill of jollity, so much better at seven in the