Gone 10pm in the award-winning Alto restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, and the world's most famous showbusiness couple have already been there for four hours.
They've sunk five bottles of wine (two red, two white and an Italian dessert wine) and eaten a four-course dinner, while the friends they were discussing charity work with have long gone.
Now, as fellow diners including actor Alec Baldwin look on, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are struggling to keep their emotions in check. He looks close to tears as he tells the mother of their children that she needs to get psychiatric help or he will leave her.
She hisses back to Brad that she's bored with him, she considers him 'toxic' and wants him out of her life.
It is said to be this dinner, earlier this month, that finally sealed the fate of the Brangelina story which has fascinated the world ever since Brad left Jennifer Aniston six years ago to be with Angelina, his co-star in Mr And Mrs Smith, the film he was working on.
When the pair left the restaurant an hour later, Angelina looked grim and determined. Brad wore an expression of deep concern as they stepped into their large people-carrier.
Were their strained looks an indication of what was going through their minds? For it was reported yesterday that a few days later the pair walked into a Beverly Hills lawyer's office to finalise the terms of their split. Although they never married, they have six children, a £205 million fortune, and several homes between them.Compared to their years of rows with differing opinions on everything from how to bring up their children to art and world poverty, their meeting at the lawyer appears to have gone smoothly. They will have joint custody of the children, who will live with Angelina.
Jennifer Aniston
They will split their fortune evenly and have agreed how they will share their extensive property portfolio. The couple own five houses on the Loz Feliz estate in Los Angeles and the 35-bedroom, £20million palace Chateau Miravel in the South of France.
They also own an island in Dubai in the shape of Ethiopia, a wildlife reserve and several villages in Cambodia, as well as a £1.2 million house in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
And they recently leased a £30 million home in Long Island, where Angelina filmed Salt.
Brad also has a £9 million house in Malibu where he lived with Jennifer Aniston. He put it on the market a year ago, but has decided to keep it.
The actor was noticeably absent at the Screen Actors' Guild awards on Saturday night, despite his film Inglourious Basterds winning a prize for outstanding cast of a motion picture.
But perhaps the most telling sign of things to come took place the night before when Brad, 46, attended the internationally publicised celebrity telethon to raise funds for Haiti - with his former wife Aniston.
Angelina, 34, is notoriously prickly about Jennifer, and Brad has only ever been seen publicly at the same event as his ex-wife on one previous occasion - last year's Oscars - and then he had Angelina at his side.
Although, until now, Angelina has always seemed to have had the upper hand in the famous love triangle which has so fascinated the public, she has never got over the fact that Brad's family, and the public at large, has always preferred Jennifer to her.
Her jealousy about Jennifer, 40, has always been hard for Brad to fathom - particularly as Angelina is still close to both her ex-husbands.
As for Jennifer, she has struggled to find lasting romance since her marriage broke up, and has often admitted she still loves Brad. Only a year ago she spoke of her hurt when Angelina confirmed what had long been suspected - that the pair's affair started before Jennifer had split from Brad.
A few weeks before their Alto dinner, Brad and Angelina had a furious row over her jealousy - and according to one magazine Angelina physically attacked him when he admitted he had been in contact with his ex-wife.
He has furiously denied allegations that he has actually spent time with Jennifer, but numerous sources say she has, very ironically, been a shoulder for him to cry on as his relationship with Angelina has crumbled.
But Brad being seen with Jennifer is far from the only clue to an imminent split. You have only to look at Brad and Angelina to see how this is affecting them both.
Once half of the sexiest couple in Hollywood, Brad, who used to be so fastidious about his appearance, now looks little better than a tramp, with his ridiculous greying beard and growing paunch. He has also made no secret that he has been taking consolation in drink - frequently boasting to journalists on a recent junket about how he was still drunk from the night before.
Angelina, meanwhile, is frighteningly skinny. Her weight is said to have fallen to less than 71/2st.Although sources close to the family deny the separation is happening, there is every indication that, in reality, the pair have been living separate lives for a long time. Brad recently bought a house in the same development of their Los Angeles base so they do not have to sleep under the same roof on the rare occasions when they are both in town.
When they stay in hotels - and much of their lives is spent in them, as they both continue to work on movie sets - they sleep in separate bedrooms, with her in the main suite and him in a bedroom next to their children.
Hotel worker Anna Kowalski, who liaised with the couple at their recent stays at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, said: 'I didn't see any kind of connection between Pitt and Jolie.
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'I've seen no family dinners, no movie nights, no dinners for the two of them alone. At night Angelina drinks white or red wine in the suite; Brad is always in the lounge drinking beer. He just sits by himself texting on his phone for hours.'
She added that, when they did go out, it was usually a stage-managed event to counteract rumours of problems in their relationship. 'It's always a big production,' she said. 'It's all orchestrated down to which door they will take.'
Sources say there is little doubt about what Angelina is going to do now. First, she will move the family to Chateau Miravel, the couple's lavish home in Provence, which she will use as a base while she films her next movie, The Tourist, in Prague and Venice.
Because of strict privacy laws in France, she will be able to mourn her relationship in peace, but no one will be surprised if some shots of her looking tragic somehow make it into the newspapers.
Once free of Brad, she also plans to fulfil her dream of adopting yet another child; it is her determination to continue to adopt children that has been one of the couple's biggest sources of aggravation.
Angelina had already adopted one child, Maddox, who is now seven and from Cambodia, when she and Brad first got together.
In the five years since, they have acquired five more children.
Three are natural born; three-year-old Shiloh and one-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne. And there are two more adopted children; Zahara, four, and five-year-old Pax.
The pair are permanently exhausted from looking after their brood and Brad describes their home life as 'chaos'. But almost as soon as she had given birth to her twins, Angelina started to talk about adopting another child.
Angelina has always been happy to parade her humanitarian credentials, and it was when she was filming Tomb Raider in 2001 in Cambodia that she first became aware of humanitarian crises overseas. She started to visit refugee camps all over the world and later that year became a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
She is said to feel immensely guilty about having her own children when there are so many unwanted orphans in the world.
She feels the couple's genetic children have each other, while Maddox and Pax, who are both boys from the Far East, are best friends. But Zahara, adopted from Ethiopia, needs a sibling who looks like her.
Angelina started her hunt for another child from Africa seven months ago. She has been looking in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa for an easy way to adopt. Brad doesn't agree with the plans.
He never felt any guilt about the couple's genetic children - he just adores them. He also felt the whole family needed some time without the upheaval of introducing yet another sibling and, as the relationship crumbled, he became even more concerned about bringing a vulnerable new child into it.
Brad Pitt
He was also worried that Angelina's almost desperate need to keep adopting, keep working, and keep doing her charity work was to cover up the depression she has been unable to shake off since the death of her actress mother Marcheline Bertrand from ovarian cancer three years ago.There are rumours that Angelina even attempted suicide at the end of last year and it seems clear that the actress is working so hard at keeping herself busy that something is eventually going to give.
She has suffered from depression in the past: as a teenager she grappled with an eating disorder and self-mutilation. And in 2000, shortly after winning an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, she checked herself into a mental home, insisting to horrified staff - and wholly without foundation - that she had murdered someone and also that she had tried to hire a hitman to kill her.
Knowing her history, Brad is said to have begged Angelina to seek psychiatric help this time around - but she has refused. Worries about the impact of her constant jetting off to the world's trouble spots with a child or two have also led to constant rows.
Unlike Angelina, whose father is the actor Jon Voight, Brad had a traditional middle-class Southern Baptist family. He always hoped for a family; but he never expected it to be like this.
Even though they have a constant rota of six nannies, having six children is exhausting. Anxious to ensure the children do not get too attached to their nannies, the women are changed every few months. The children fight for their parents' attention.
The pair take turns at living without them. Angelina rents a suite at the Raffles L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills to escape. Brad enjoys weeklong jaunts with friends to Europe, where he drinks and buys art.
When they spend so much time apart, in different parts of the world, it's no wonder that there have been numerous allegations of infidelity. Earlier this month it was claimed that Angelina had been sleeping with a vocal coach on her latest movie, Salt.
And last month Angelina added fuel to the fire of allegations when she told a German magazine: 'Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.
'I doubt that fidelity is absolutely essential for a relationship. It's worse to leave your partner and talk badly about him afterwards.'
Another huge source of contention is Angelina's brother James Haven. He first became a subject of public fascination when his sister picked up her first and only Oscar, saying she was 'so in love with my brother right now' before giving him a long kiss on the lips.
A friend says: 'Angie adores him so much that Shiloh was named after him - it was his family nickname.'
All Brad and Angelina's rows have served to show the pair just how ill-matched they are. While the couple may initially have been bewitched by an extraordinary sexual magnetism which saw them spending whole days in bed together, those differences have since come to the fore.
Both are tired of the rows and the unhappiness. One question arises from the collapse of the Pitt-Jolie household. Does it mean Brad doing a lot more charity work with a certain Jennifer Aniston - as he was on Friday night?
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