After all, she could have responded to Lauren cheating on her by being mature and forgiving, instead of rebounding onto a guy she was only vaguely into. She could have been more careful about condoms. Even after she decided to keep the baby, she could have let her parents step in—like they’d wanted to—and gone back to university. But oh, no, she’d insisted on raising Amelie herself. Being in her daughter’s life. Giving her the sort of childhood Rosaline had never had. Except, fast-forward a bit, and here she was, unable to give her daughter half of what she deserved and trying to compensate for that by going on a reality TV competition that was famous primarily for that one time somebody sat on somebody else’s trifle.

“What are you doing?” Colin Thrimp was right there, as well as a camera, a camera operator, a sound technician, and a boom mic.

“Doubting the wisdom of every choice I’ve ever made.” Well, balls. She’d said that aloud, hadn’t she?

Colin Thrimp smiled his limpest smile. “That’s lovely. But can we have it again as if you weren’t answering a question.”

“I’m not sure I want to say ‘I’m doubting the wisdom of every choice I’ve ever made’ on national television.”

“Don’t worry. Contestants say lines like that all the time. It makes them look relatable.”

Rosaline hesitated, trying to figure out if it was worse that she’d committed to doing this objectively pointless thing or that she was now trying to get out of the objectively pointless thing that she’d committed to do.

“So at the moment,” she said, trying to sound at least a little bit like she was joking, “I’m trying to work out how long to blanch my almonds for and doubting the wisdom of every choice I’ve ever made.”

They broke for a late lunch so the crew could take glamour shots of the bakes, which, in some cases, were not looking all that glamorous. Rosaline had intended to catch up with Alain, but he and Anvita and a couple of other contestants had been shepherded off for interviews. Which left Rosaline feeling distinctly first-day-of-school as she tried to navigate the curly sandwiches and soggy wraps on her own.

Clutching a sad-looking cheese and pickle in one hand, she approached the tea trolley and found herself standing next to someone who had to be Anvita’s second stone-cold hottie—the guy with the manly hands whose tight T-shirt Rosaline felt distinctly regressive for enjoying.

“Do you want a cuppa, love?” he asked.

Oh God, he was one of those. And yes, he had arms that said I have earned these through honest toil and eyelashes like a baby deer. And yes, his jeans were clinging in places nice girls weren’t supposed to notice jeans clinging. But this was going to end one of two ways: either she was going to tell him to stop calling her love and he was going to get defensive and make her feel shitty about herself, or else she wouldn’t and she’d feel shitty about herself all on her own.

Opting for the flavour of shittiness where she at least didn’t make a scene, she gritted her teeth. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Right you are.” He picked up one of the large silver jug things that someone had helpfully labelled “Tea” and upended it over the first of two cups. Nothing happened. He put it back down and pushed on the top experimentally. Nothing happened. “Aw, bollocks.”

“Sometimes there’s a button on the handle,” Rosaline offered. He peered more closely at the jug. “What I don’t get is why they can’t make them so they all work the same.”

“Perhaps they want to make life more interesting for us.”

“If I want something interesting, I’ll listen to the radio. Right now, I just want some bloody tea.”

“You could take the lid off maybe?”

“Knowing my luck, I’d break it. And then I’d have to go up to that Colin bloke and be, Mate, I broke your thing, I’m really sorry. And he’d be, Oh, this is awful, Jennifer will be upset. And I’ll be like, Mate, it’s not my fault. They should make them so they all work the same and they don’t.”

Rosaline blinked, caught off guard by the magnitude of this beverage-based catastrophising. “Okay. Alternative plan. I take the lid off.”

Stepping back, he put his hands in the air like he was being held at gunpoint. “Be my guest, love.”

It was at this juncture that Rosaline realised she couldn’t pour tea for a man who kept talking to her like, well, like pouring tea was one of a very limited set of things she was good for. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be weird about this, but . . . can you not call me love?”

He looked briefly surprised, then shrugged. “Yeah, all right. I don’t mean nothing by it.”

The part of Rosaline that, despite all her efforts, was still her father’s daughter itched to correct his grammar. Of course, Lauren would have argued that dialect was an important feature of identity, and the rules about double negatives were made up by a bunch of insecure pricks in the seventeenth century who thought English should either work like maths or Latin. But Rosaline had been raised to believe that there were rights and wrongs about this kind of thing, and you didn’t drop your g’s or your h’s or permit a glottal stop to replace a perfectly functional t.

“I’m sure it’s not personal,” she said instead. “But you wouldn’t call me that if I was a man.”

He seemed to be thinking about this. As far as Rosaline was concerned, it wasn’t a difficult concept, but at least he wasn’t shouting at her. “If you was a bloke, I’d probably call you mate.”

“You know”—she ended up sounding sharper than she meant to—“you could always use my name.”

“What’s your name then?” He offered her a slow smile. Not the sort of smile she would have expected from someone who looked like him or talked like him. Shy almost and oddly genuine. “I’m Harry, by the way. Not that you asked.”

“Oh. Sorry. Um, Rosaline.”

“You what?” he asked. “Rosaline?”

“Yes. Like in Romeo and Juliet.”

“Look, I know I didn’t do that well in school, but”—he eyed her nervously—“isn’t the girl in Romeo and Juliet called . . . Juliet?”

It had been ages since she’d had this conversation. And frankly, she could have done without it now. “Rosaline’s the woman Romeo is in love with at the beginning. Then he forgets about her when he sees Juliet.”