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‘I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.’

Verity kept her eyes shut and sat there frozen in an agony of mortification. Her shame lasted for aeons or maybe only a few seconds, until she felt a slight displacement of air, then something that felt like cashmere brushed against her cheek and a voice said, ‘I’m Johnny.’

She reluctantly opened her eyes. He, the man, Johnny, had stood up to shake hands with Posy and Nina, who pulled her confused face.

‘Johnny? You’re not Peter Hardy, oceanographer, then?’ Nina’s voice was breathy with gleeful horror. At some later date, Verity was going to kill her. After they’d had words, post-watershed words. There were rules about this sort of thing. You didn’t catch a friend allegedly cheating on her alleged boyfriend, then rat her out to the man she was cheating on him with. You just didn’t. It was against the basic rules of feminism.

Johnny looked down at Verity, who shut her eyes again because his expression was the absolute opposite of encouraging.

‘No, not Peter,’ she managed to say, even though it was hard to squeeze the words out past the lump in her throat and the dead weight that was her tongue. ‘I didn’t actually say I was going to meet Peter. You just assumed.’ At least now the worst was over and Verity could just lie. Lie through her teeth. Say that Johnny was the son of one of her father’s parishioners (her father’s parishioners had, conveniently, a lot of children between them) and they’d arranged to meet here because he needed some spiritual guidance. Even though spiritual guidance was really more her father’s department. ‘Anyway, Johnny is—’

‘I know this is still quite a new thing but I didn’t realise that you were seeing other people too. Just who is Peter Hardy, oceanographer? Is he someone I should be worried about?’ Verity could feel the heat sweep across her chest, up her neck, along her cheeks so that even her earlobes felt as if they’d been plunged into boiling-hot water. She’d been hoisted by her own petard, ‘h-ed by her own p,’ as her family was fond of saying, and this had now gone from bad to worse to verging on absolutely bloody catastrophic.

‘Verity Love, you bad, bad girl!’ Posy gasped in delight. ‘You never said anything about juggling two men. And you a vicar’s daughter, too!’

It was their go-to line whenever Verity did anything even a little bit not good. From swearing, to saying uncharitable things about reality TV contestants, to apparently playing two men off against each other.

‘Oh, well, the thing is … Gosh … I don’t really know …’ Whole sentences would be great. Would be peachy, in fact. Verity felt hands on her shoulders once more, squeezing her gently, then Nina rested her chin on top of Verity’s head.

‘Please don’t get the wrong idea about Very,’ she said and Verity steeled herself for Nina to overshare on her behalf. Knowing Nina, she’d probably tell this unimpressed-looking stranger that Peter Hardy left Verity on her own far too much when he was away on ocean-related business and that Verity had needs and so she wasn’t to be blamed for letting her attentions wander. It was something that Nina had often pondered aloud, usually when the shop was full of customers, because Nina had no respect for other people’s boundaries. ‘Let me tell you about this woman. This woman once borrowed her landlord’s car and drove through a rainstorm on a school night to pick me up from a campsite in Derbyshire where I’d been abandoned by my bastard ex-boyfriend. She’s got the kindest heart of anyone I know.’

The man, Johnny, was still standing up. He was lean and tall, tall enough that Verity had to tip her head back to catch the considered look he gave her as if there might be something more to her than a presumptuous, gatecrashing liar.

‘Look, we haven’t had the talk about whether we were exclusive or not yet. I mean, we haven’t even been on one date.’ Verity had managed to spit out two complete sentences and she’d managed not to lie. Well, hardly lie. And it was all going to be fine because Johnny sat back down and smiled, not tightly this time but lazily, as if this was all an amusing distraction from whatever he’d been frowning about before.

‘No time like the present for that talk, I think. Ladies, it was a pleasure, I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.’

They only backed away when Verity turned and gave them a look that said very plainly, ‘I can think of at least ten ways to kill the pair of you and make it look like an accident.’ She could have quite happily stayed like that forever, but Posy and Nina were at the door, giving her double thumbs up and mouthing things like ‘Get in there!’ and ‘You go girl!’ until Johnny pointedly cleared his throat and Verity had to turn around.

‘I’m so sorry. I panicked and I couldn’t think what else to do,’ Verity confessed, as she stared down at her white-knuckled hands clenched around the lip of the table. She had a splodge of black ink on her thumb.

‘Probably not as sorry as Peter Hardy, the oceanographer.’

‘There is no Peter Hardy. Look, I really am sorry and I’ve taken up enough of your time—’

‘What exactly do you mean when you say there’s no Peter Hardy?’

Johnny’s voice was cultured and precise, which was just a fancy way of saying posh, but also warm, like he was smiling, though Verity could neither confirm nor deny this as she was still gazing at the ink splodge on her thumb.

Verity looked up. There hadn’t been time before to do anything other than check that he was in full working order, but now she could see why Posy and Nina had been practically shoving each other out of the way to get a better look at him.

But who could blame Posy and Nina when this Johnny was actually very handsome in a Brideshead Revisited, oh-yes-in-my-spare-time-I-do-a-spot-of-modelling-for-Burberry way? He was high of cheekbone and if he weren’t smiling then his full lips, lush and pillow-y, would look positively sulky. He had thick, glossy brown hair cropped close at the back and sides, then left free to roam on top so he could keep pushing it back, all the better to display his ridiculous cheekbones and eyes which were bluey green or maybe even greeny blue and it would probably be a good idea to stop gazing into them like a small woodland animal trapped in the crosshairs. He was a grown-up version of the pale, sneering boys doing Foundation Art at the local college that Verity had yearned after when she was a teenager. Sadly, those boys had always sneered at her yearning because she was one of the vicar’s five odd daughters and she wasn’t beautiful enough for the oddness not to be an issue.

She wasn’t hideous either, not by any stretch of the imagination, but still Verity had never once managed to get their attention. Not like this stranger who was waiting a little impatiently, if the drumming of his fingers on the table was anything to go by, for her to start speaking.

Peter Hardy, oceanographer. Where to begin?

Well, she could always start with the truth.

‘So, um, Peter Hardy started from a silly conversation with my sister Merry about what my perfect boyfriend would be like. Eventually we had a whole back story for him but he was only ever an imaginary boyfriend, until my friends … they mean well … but you see, they kept trying to set me up with any random man going spare or signing me up for dating sites and, oh God, do you know about that dating app, HookUpp?’

He shuddered. ‘Everyone in my office under thirty is obsessed with it.’

‘I was forced to install it on my phone because it was easier than explaining for the hundredth time why I wasn’t interested in a relationship, then one night I left my phone on the table in the pub while I went to the loo and when I came back, they’d been up-swiping some absolute horrors and I suddenly heard myself saying that I already had a boyfriend and his name was Peter Hardy.’