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that he was going out with his brothers, then added an eye-roll, as if it was just something that had to be done.
    Anna laughed involuntarily. She knew that meant he’d be forced to drink shots and go to some hideous club on an industrial estate out of town that they’d gone to when they were sixteen. An image of his siblings with their middle-aged One Direction haircuts made her wince. She knew they called her a stuck-up cow and blamed her for the loss of Seb’s apparent sense of fun.
    As he leant over and kissed her on the top of the head, Anna found herself saying, before she could stop herself, ‘Why didn’t you stand up for me in the pub the other day?’
    Seb turned and leant against the sink. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’
    She looked at the bleeding cuts on the backs of her hand where she’d been lugging boxes around all day, her chipped nails with dirt underneath them, her bruised legs. ‘It just feels a bit like you’re punishing me.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He shook his head. ‘Anna, I was unhappy in London. I’m not ashamed to admit it. We both made mistakes, we both lived outside our means, the wedding was just the icing on the cake. I promise, I’m not punishing you. By no means am I punishing you. I suppose I just want you to try.’ He paused, his fingers thrumming on the edge of the porcelain basin, ‘Also, I wonder if maybe you weren’t as happy as you think you were.’
    Anna guffawed. ‘I was happy!’
    Seb shrugged and nodded, then turned and opened the bathroom cabinet, fishing about for some aftershave. ‘I saw the vicar today,’ he said after a moment.
    Anna paused, popped a bubble in her bath.
    ‘He said we were welcome to use the church for the service. Said that it would be nice you know, to go full circle, since I was christened there. I thought that was nice. You know, a nice thing to say. He didn’t have to say anything, did he? But I thought that was nice.’
    ‘You’re rambling.’
    ‘It’s because I’m nervous about telling you this. Nervous of what your reaction is going to be.’
    ‘If you know my reaction, why are you telling me?’ She suddenly wanted to be out of the bath, dry and dressed and having this conversation at eye-level.
    ‘Because I think it could solve quite a lot of problems. And if we use the village hall it’ll be one hundred pounds. That’s it, Anna. One hundred pounds. That’s nothing.’
    ‘The hall I did Brownies in and ballet lessons and choir practice and sat with my dad at the antiques fairs? That hall, you mean?’
    Seb nodded again, a little less vigorously.
    ‘The hall where all the old people have their weekly bridge sessions and that smells of cabbage and boiled potatoes afterwards?’
    ‘That’s the one.’
    Anna nodded.
    Seb bit his lip and seemed to close his eyes for slightly longer than a blink.
    ‘And the vicar who counselled my mum to stay with my dad even though he’d been having an affair for two years? That one? Still the same one?’
    Seb did a really small nod, almost imperceptible.
    ‘That it was her duty to stay with him even though he had no intention of giving his mistress up? That the sanctity of marriage meant turning a blind eye.’
    ‘I had actually forgotten that bit‒’ Seb swallowed.
    Anna breathed in through her nose and slowly exhaled like they used to do at her Bikram yoga class that she couldn’t go to any more because there was only one in the next village and it was twenty pounds a class. She was lucky if there was Pilates in Nettleton, and Zumba…Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
    The bubbles on her fingers glistened in the drooping sun, pearlised pinks and blues like sequins. Twinkling on white, reminding her of the first costume hand-stitched just for her. The individual silver sequins flickering on netting under the heat of the strip-lighting in the shabby costume department. The material as it was ruched and pinned, the corset as it was nipped and tucked, the patterns