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Abel wiped his hands on his shorts and fished out his phone. ‘All this dust, I can’t get it to read my fingerprint. Can you . . .?’ He held it out to her. ‘Yes, thanks.’

Perspiration prickled at her hairline. As she picked up his phone, Temperance felt the calloused patches on his palm graze against the soft pad of her thumb. ‘I don’t . . . know your code.’

Abel looked at her, his grey-green eyes direct and piercing. His face a blank picture of neutrality. ‘Same one I always had. You choose whatever. Because we really have to get this job finished.’

‘Course.’ Her fingers tapped out the code that somehow a part of her brain had kept locked away in a safe all these years. Maybe in a filing cabinet called ‘Useless Abel Gulliver facts that will only cause you pain’. That’s how much they’d trusted each other, when they were younger: all secrets out in the open, nothing hidden or forbidden. But now Abel dodged the simplest question, the smallest interaction.

Temperance rushed her way through selecting a playlist of noughties hip-hop and put the phone down on a log behind him. It didn’t feel right to have access to his stuff, not now.

She cleared her throat and reminded herself what it was she was supposed to be doing: helping a neighbour then getting out of there. ‘Bricks it is, then.’ Temperance wiped her clammy hands on her back pockets and got back to work.

‘Are you really sure you can take it? I’m going to slide it in slowly, but it’s heavy.’

Temperance swore under her breath. ‘Yes, I’m sure! Just do it already.’

Abel was standing behind her, hot bursts of his ragged breathing landing on her neck. He had the top bar of the gate on his shoulder; the bottom bars rested on bricks but it was still a big piece of wrought iron to manipulate.

‘Get ready to take a bit more of the weight then, I’m going to move in three, two, one . . .’

Suddenly, Temperance felt the weight hit her own shoulder, like a mad scientist had cranked up the gravity in the field, and her knees felt like they might buckle. But in another moment Abel was in front of her, lifting the gate and again he took the brunt of it. With a clank that sent vibrations along her arms, the hinges slotted into place and Abel sprinted to kick away the supporting bricks.

The gate gave a smooth swing towards the field and Temperance pulled it back, moving the latch to hold it closed. ‘Amazing. Gate Repair 101 with Abel Gulliver.’ She put her hands on her hips and smiled. There’d been nothing magical about the work she’d done this afternoon, but the satisfaction went just as deep.

‘Dedicated labouring skills supplied by Temperance Molland.’ The shadow of a smile played at Abel’s mouth before he quickly pushed his lips together into a flat line. ‘I’d better get the tools back.’

‘What a team!’ Praveen called from the hut, leaning out of the window. ‘We’ve missed you round here, Abel. Haven’t we, Temperance?’ She gave a wink so unsubtle it could be seen from space. ‘Can’t thank you enough, darlings. Make sure you take as many strawberries as you can carry home as a thank you, yes?’

Temperance was exhausted, but she couldn’t shake the dream of a fresh scone blanketed by juicy strawberries and weighed down by a pillow of clotted cream. Truly the only satisfying reward for a sweaty day of squatting in sacks and being an unpaid, unwashed farmhand. She grabbed two abandoned punnets from one of the furrows and passed one to Abel. ‘Every man for himself.’

Maybe it was the gruelling heat or how brain-fried Temperance was by the dreams and the doom and the worry, but she fell into a silent search with Abel. He took one side of the planted rows and she took the other. The only sounds were the birds, Praveen’s distant radio and Abel’s occasional huffs.

‘Buggers have stripped the place,’ he said, mostly to himself.

Temperance kept her eyes on the spikey green leaves and the scorched soil. She tried to block out the sight of Abel’s forearms as they moved the plants gently aside. She tried not to think about how solid they had felt under her touch at FairyFest. She tried not to notice how she could so easily, so innocently, move her hands next to his and brush against them. She tried to remind herself that this was the grown man who rolled his eyes at their festival, who’d deserted his hometown and even now stomped away from crowded dance floors. Not the adolescent she’d once known who would have shared his findings evenly between her and Susie without hesitation. Because they’d felt like a unit back then: undistinguishable from each other, almost. Temperance told herself that was the only reason she was feeling these pangs of attraction to him: it was just an echo of the past, nothing real in the here and now. She was being haunted by her own crush from the past and those feelings would get her nowhere.

‘Susie once tried to convince me I was allergic to strawberries, do you remember?’ Temperance blurted out, before she realised she wasn’t just talking inside her head any longer.

‘Hm? No. No, I don’t. Sorry.’ Abel hunkered down into a crouch, his empty punnet at his side.

‘Ah.’ She felt a lump at the base of her throat and swallowed it down. Of course he wouldn’t remember, not the silly memories of a girl who had the cringiest of all crushes on him.

Temperance took a deep breath and went on, faking confidence in her own anecdote now to style it out. ‘It was my twelfth birthday, this big picnic on the green. You were there but anyway . . . I had this huge Victoria sponge with cut strawberries on the top. I don’t know if me having all the limelight was getting to Suse, but she tried to convince me – in her gobby seven-year-old way – that I was super allergic to strawberries and if I ate any of my own cake I would freak out and rip all my own clothes off.’

Temperance spotted a tiny strawberry and twisted it off its stalk.

‘When I tried to point out that I’d definitely eaten strawberries before and had felt OK, she put on this little stony face and said that it was all part of the medical condition – I would forget the crazy things I’d done instantly. And that mum had sworn her to secrecy about it. For my own good. She literally had her grubby little hands on the plate, pulling it towards her. So I did what any good big sister would do.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Abel said in a faraway voice. He was probably thinking of his real life back in Bath, Temperance thought, but she was fed up of pretending Abel hadn’t been a huge part of her life once upon a time. He’d been there, he’d seen it all. And if he really didn’t remember then she would replay it for him, scene by scene, until he did.

‘Yup. I called her on her bullshit. Popped a strawberry in my mouth, started crossing my eyes and chanting French verbs. Even started rolling down my socks until she freaked out and screamed at me to stop. You calmed her down with some Frazzles.’

‘Right.’

Temperance watched his face for any flicker of recognition, but there was nothing. She shook away the prickle behind her eyes and turned her attention back to the ground, moving further along to the end of the row.

The heat was going to her head, that was all it was.

‘Right, here’s some.’ She spotted three fat strawberry plants, chocked with untouched fruit, nestled under a bush.