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and hairdresser, Harry.
    'How do you think I can get my parents back together again?' she'd asked him as he'd combed through her long wet locks.
    'Pah!' he'd laughed, shrugged his shoulders and said 'Amore!? You ask-a me about amore?' Because although he'd been born and brought up about two centimetres from the Mile End Road, he liked to ramp up 'the Italian in him', believed to be a long since deceased grandparent.
    'I think she still loves him,' Anna had observed, watching the neat comb and snip, comb and snip going on at the very bottom of her hair.
    'For her, the door is still open. She hasn't found anyone else, maybe she doesn't want to find anyone else.' Big shrug. 'But for heeeeem? I don't-a know.'
    'He has a girlfriend,' Anna told Harry, 'but she's awful. Young and dumb,' she added, sounding so like one of his Wednesday afternoon OAPs that it was hard not to laugh.
    'But what can I do? You know, to get them back together?' Anna had asked again.
    'Nothing,' was Harry's warning. 'If it was really love, the once in a lifetime stuff that everyone gets so excited about, they will wake up some day and realize.'
    'But what if only one of them realizes?' she'd asked.
    'Well, then it isn't meant to be.' Snip, snip. 'Two people have to be in love together, or else the whole thing falls apart, no?'
    'But can't I just remind them that they still love each other?'
    'How can you be sure?'
    'I'm their daughter. I know this stuff.' She'd crossed her arms and kicked her legs out with a clang against the wall.
    So that was why she was now trying to remind her father of the night he first came across Eve.
    'How did we meet?!' he was repeating her question. 'Oh, you know that story, don't you? Anyway, it was a long time ago.' For a moment, Anna thought he was about to get up and her chance would be gone.
    So she quickly added: 'I know the first thing you ever said to her,' as a prompt.
    'Do you?'
    'Yeah, she told me ages ago. It was: "Do you believe in love at first sight or do I have to walk past you again?"'
    Anna laughed and Joseph felt himself blush.
    Partly because it was such an embarrassing line and partly because with those words he was, of course, there, in the sweaty little jazz club ... ten years ago now . . . clapping eyes on Eve for the very first time and reliving the moment when he had gone to talk to her with a suddenly dry throat and knees in danger of actually knocking together.
    She had been leaning on the bar, sticking out a small pert bottom, twiddling with long blond hair, and he'd only been able to see one side of her face, but the expression was a beguiling mixture of dreamy calm and mischief.
    As he'd got closer, he'd realized that she was about ten years older than she had looked from afar and this had made him even more afraid and even more inflamed. He'd never felt anything like this. And even as he'd prepared to do the line – ironically, of course – he'd been convinced this was the coup de foudre (well, he was a French lit and philosophy student at the time). This was, on his part anyway, love at first sight.

Chapter Five
    'Do you believe in love at first sight? Or do I have to walk past you again?'
    She had laughed out loud and taken in the handsome face framed with overgrown dark hair. He was ridiculously young. But then so was everyone else in this dim, clammy little nightclub she'd been taken to by her best friend Jen, Jen's husband Ryan and two other friends from work.
    Jen and Eve had been looking forward to the rare night out for weeks, buying silly tight tops, new lipsticks and sparkly eye shadows at the shopping centre, scanning the listings pages for a club that sounded good.
    Eve's boys had been taken to Jen's house to sleep over with her sons and a babysitter, and the five adults had piled into a shared cab to the funky little soul and salsa venue in Islington.
    And how liberating it was to drink, dance and watch a different kind of world go by. Eve felt full of fun. Jen had been right, they