The Big Little Wedding in Carlton Square: A gorgeously heartwarming romance and one of the top summer holiday reads for women. Michele Gorman

you couldn’t come with us, Emma, you’d have loved it there! Nothing to do for two weeks but drink wine by the pool. It was divine. Which reminds me. What if we did something similar for your hen do? Or even hire the same place. I’m sure we could get the villa again, and you can have all your friends and family there under the same roof! It’ll easily sleep twenty and it’s so much more personal than having hotel rooms on some city break. I think your Auntie Rose would love it. There are a few steps down to the pool, but we could always help her up and down.’

      Her deep brown eyes dance with delight at the idea. She’s never met Auntie Rose and thinks she’s a genteel East London Miss Marple.

      ‘Well, I did only know Daniel a few weeks when you went away,’ I say. ‘It was a bit early to crash his holidays.’

      ‘We’d have loved having you there,’ she says. ‘You’re such a breath of fresh air for us.’

      She’s always saying things like this and they sound like compliments, but I could also be the cut-price flavour of the month. I never feel like I know for sure.

      There’s no doubt we’re different, a fact that she’s either hyper-aware of or seems to completely forget.

      Take my hen do. She’s got completely bonkers ideas about where to go. I’m not sure whether staying in a French villa would be more or less pricey than the long weekend at the spa in Baden-Baden she suggested last week, or going to see the Bolshoi Ballet in St Petersburg. That’s St Petersburg, Russia, not some theatre in Kent, in case you wondered.