On the last night Margot and I had supper in the hotel’s dining room, at her behest. I dressed up in my dark pink velvet top and my three-quarter-length silk culottes and she wore a frilled green floral shirt and matching slacks (I had sewn an extra button in the waistline so that they didn’t slip down over her hips) and we quietly enjoyed the widening eyes of the other guests as we were shown to our seats at the best table by the big window.

‘Now, dear. It’s our last night, so I think we should push the boat out, don’t you?’ she said, lifting a regal hand to wave at the guests who were still staring. I was just wondering whose particular boat was being pushed when she added, ‘I think I’ll have the lobster. And perhaps some champagne. I suspect this is the last time I shall come here, after all.’

I started to protest, but she cut me off: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. It’s a fact, Louisa. A bald fact. I thought you British girls were made of sterner stuff.’

So we ordered a bottle of champagne and two lobsters, and as the sun set we picked at the delicious, garlicky flesh and I cracked open the claws that Margot was too frail to manage and handed them back to her; she sucked at them with little delighted noises and passed tiny bits of flesh down to where Dean Martin was being diplomatically ignored by everyone else. We shared a huge bowl of French fries (I ate most of them and she scattered a few on her plate and said they were really quite good).

We sat in companionable, overstuffed silence as the restaurant slowly emptied, and she paid with a seldom-used credit card (‘I’ll be dead before they come looking for payment, hah!’). Then Charlie walked over stiffly and put a giant hand on her tiny shoulder. He said he would be getting off to bed but he hoped he would see her in the morning before she left and that it had been a true pleasure to see her again after all these years.

‘The pleasure was all mine, Charlie. Thank you for the most wonderful stay.’ Her eyes wrinkled with affection, and they clutched each other’s hands until he released hers reluctantly and turned away.

‘I went to bed with him once,’ she said, as he walked off. ‘Lovely man. No good for me, of course.’

As I coughed out my last French fry, she gave me a weary look. ‘It was the seventies, Louisa. I’d been alone for a long time. It’s been rather nice seeing him again. Widowed now, of course.’ She sighed. ‘At my age everybody is.’

We sat in silence for a while, gazing out at the endless, inky black ocean. A long way off you could just make out the tiny winking lights of the fishing vessels. I wondered how it would feel to be out there, on your own, in the middle of nowhere.

And then Margot spoke. ‘I didn’t expect to come back here,’ she said quietly. ‘So I should thank you. It’s been … it’s been something of a tonic.’

‘For me too, Margot. I feel … unscrambled.’

She smiled at me before reaching down to pat Dean Martin. He was stretched out under her chair, snoring quietly. ‘You did the right thing, you know, with Josh. He wasn’t for you.’

I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say. I had spent three days thinking of the person I might have become if I had stayed with Josh – affluent, semi-American, mostly happy even, and had discovered that, after a few short weeks, Margot understood me better than I understood myself. I would have moulded myself to fit him. I would have shed the clothes I loved, the things I cared most about. I would have transformed my behaviour, my habits, lost in his charismatic slipstream. I would have become a corporate wife, blaming myself for the bits of me that wouldn’t fit, never-endingly grateful for this Will in American form.

I didn’t think about Sam. I’d become very good at that.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly.’

She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and I waited, wondering who she was addressing.

Three weeks passed uneventfully after we returned from Montauk. My life no longer felt as if it held any real certainties at all, so I had decided to live as Will had told me, simply existing in each moment, until my hand was forced again. At some point, I supposed, Margot would be either unwell enough or in debt enough that our contented little bubble would pop and I would have to book my flight home.

Until then, it was not an unpleasant way to live. The routines that punctuated my day gave me pleasure – my runs around Central Park, my strolls with Dean Martin, preparing the evening meal for Margot, even if she didn’t eat much, and our now joint nightly viewing of Wheel of Fortune, shouting letters at the Mystery Wedges. I upped my wardrobe game, embracing my New York self with a series of looks that left Lydia and her sister slack-jawed in admiration. Sometimes I wore things that Margot lent me, and sometimes I wore things I had bought from the Emporium. Every day I stood in front of the mirror in Margot’s spare room and surveyed the racks I was allowed to pick from, and a part of me sparked with joy.

I had work, of sorts, doing shifts for the girls at the Vintage Clothes Emporium while Angelica was away doing a sweep of a women’s garment factory in Palm Springs that had apparently kept samples of every item it had made since 1952. I manned the till alongside Lydia, helping pale-skinned young girls into vintage prom dresses and praying the zips would hold, while she reorganized the layout of the racks and fretted noisily about the amount of wasted space in their outlet. ‘You know what square footage costs now, around here?’ she said, shaking her head at our lone rotating rail in the far corner. ‘Seriously. I would be letting that corner as valet parking if we could work out how to get the cars in.’

I thanked a customer who had just bought a sequined tulle bolero and slammed the till drawer shut. ‘So why don’t you let it? To a shop or something? It would give you more income.’

‘Yeah, we’ve talked about it. It’s complicated. As soon as you’ve got other retailers involved you need to build a partition and separate access and get insurance, and then you don’t know who you got coming in at all hours … Strangers in our stuff. It’s too risky.’ She chewed her gum and blew a bubble, popping it absently with a purple-nailed finger. ‘Plus, you know, we don’t like anybody.’

‘Louisa!’ Ashok was standing on the carpet and clapped his gloved hands together as I arrived home. ‘You coming to ours next Saturday? Meena wants to know.’

‘Is the protest still on?’

The two previous Saturdays I couldn’t help but notice there had been a distinct dwindling of the numbers. The hopes of local residents were almost non-existent now. The chanting had become half-hearted as the city’s budgets tightened, the seasoned protesters slowly drifting away. Months after the action had started, just our little core remained, Meena rallying everyone with bottles of water and insisting it wasn’t over till it was over.

‘It’s still happening. You know my wife.’

‘Then I’d love to. Thank you. Tell her I’ll bring dessert.’

‘You got it.’ He made a happy mm-mm sound to himself at the prospect of good food, and called as I reached the elevator, ‘Hey!’

‘What?’

‘Nice threads, lady.’

That day I was dressed in homage to Desperately Seeking Susan. I wore a purple silk bomber jacket with a rainbow embroidered on the back, leggings, layered vests and an armful of bangles, which had made a pleasing jangle each time I’d whacked the till drawer shut (it wouldn’t close properly unless you did).