More than tamed, though; Patrick had met his match. ‘She makes me want to be a better man,’ he confessed to Dan after a few pints, early on in the relationship. ‘To try harder. To be good. Do you know what I mean?’ Dan knew exactly what he meant. Because Zoe herself was good through and through, smiling and golden; a person who shone her attention on you like a lamp and made you feel warm in the glow. She listened properly, remembering tiny threads of conversation and then restringing them the next time you met. Did you get that commission you were hoping for? How’s Rebecca’s dad? What was the film like – is it worth seeing?

Once, just after Dan had split up with Rebecca, Zoe had paid a surprise visit, only to find him blind drunk and unshaven with the curtains pulled at four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been embarrassed to see her looking so pretty and clean in his grungy living room, and half- expected her to start flinging wide the curtains and forcing coffee down his throat. Instead she’d cracked open a beer with him, slouched companionably into the sofa and said, ‘Go on then, tell me all about it.’ He’d ended up feeling a fraction better about everything as they talked, as if one person in the world might understand, after all.

But today . . . Today she looked terrible. Her radiant face seemed to have caved in, all the sparkle bleached away, her shoulders drooping with an unbearable weariness.

He had done that to her, he thought. He had done that.

The guilt was so monstrous that he had to lean against the nearby rack of greetings cards because he suddenly felt unsteady, as if the ground was shifting beneath him. He dropped the wire basket to the floor with a metallic clatter and left the supermarket, smarting with shame.