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lawn (quite a feat for a six year old given it was almost half a mile long), her father ran after her. He grabbed her just as she reached the bridge that arced over the canal and she wriggled in his arms all the way back to the house.
    It’s in her DNA, apparently, that restlessness, that need to run. She inherited it from her mother, she says. That’s why no one was surprised when we found out that she’d run away this morning; she bounces off every wall she touches, like a butterfly trying to find an open window. She’s done it so many times – when she went to Glastonbury with Dominic the summer before we met, last October when she went to New York to audition for Hamlet and didn’t tell anyone because she didn’t want to jinx it – that it’s just become her ‘thing’. Some people play the ukulele, some collect stamps, Scarlett Chiltern runs away. So before Ballard had even finished telling us in assembly, Sam had started a book on when she’d be back. Most people went for twenty-four hours, Molly put £50 on thirty-six because she was sure she was in New York again. When Dominic found out, he told Sam to stop being a dick.
    It didn’t take long before the theories began to circulate. I was only in the dining hall a few minutes before I heard three: she was in Vegas with a guy she’d met on the Internet, she was doing a campaign with Stella McCartney and she’d got a part in a film with James McAvoy. It’s a shame she missed it, she would have loved it.
    When I spoke to him earlier, he told me to sign in for lunch then meet him in the prop room. We haven’t done that in months, not since we first got together and the thought of waiting until 3 o’clock was unbearable. It feels like it’s always me calling – breathless and a little desperate – asking to see him, so I was so excited that I didn’t even bother to pretend to queue in the dining hall. I just signed in, then slipped out again. But of all the people to catch me, of course it was Molly.
    ‘Off to meet Dominic?’ she said with a satisfied smile.
    ‘Jesus. Will you let it go? I’m not seeing Dominic,’ I said over my shoulder, turned and ran towards the theatre, my bag knocking against my hip.
    By the time I got to it, my heart was pounding. My fingers trembled as I reached for the handle on the door. It’s been five months but I feel that every time and I love it, love how every bit of me shudders at the thought of seeing him again. I held my breath as I ran through the warren of corridors behind the stage, past the dressing rooms and abandoned ladders, checking over my shoulder every other step until I got to the prop room. I sucked in a breath and blew it out again, hoping it would satisfy my throbbing lungs as I stepped into the dim light. But as I walked past the metal shelves of wine bottles and candlesticks, and the rails and rails of costumes, to the back – where the painted wooden cut-outs of ships and cars stood propped against the wall – I couldn’t catch my breath.
    I went to the corner, to the red-velvet couch we’d claimed as our own, to find it cloaked in a paint-splattered dust cloth. I was tugging it off when he jumped out from behind a painted crocodile, clearly thrilled as I screamed. I slapped his arm, but he was unrepentant, grabbing my waist and pulling me to him.
    ‘I’ve missed you, Miss Okomma.’ He breathed, nose in my hair, mouth on the shell of my ear and, I don’t know how, but I knew he was smiling.
    ‘I haven’t missed you,’ I lied, slapping him again.
    He laughed and I could feel his whole body humming as he pulled me closer and it was like when we first got together and he couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t stop looking at me, touching me, his finger turning in my hair then tracing the curve of my bottom lip then playing with a loose button on my blazer.
    ‘Are you OK?’ I breathed.
    He looked at me, then pressed a kiss to my mouth. ‘I am now.’
    When he held me again, I felt him