Shona looked down into her pot. The water had worked its magic now, turning the dry, greyish-yellow block into something wetter, and marginally more edible.

“Pretty sure I’ve got it on DVD,” she said. “And there was mention, I seem to recall, of a date…”

Logan chewed his lip thoughtfully and looked past her into the middle distance. “I mean, I’d have to check with Heather,” he began, then a jab from the fork made him hold up his hands in surrender. “Kidding! The Crow it is, then.”

“Tonight?” Shona asked.

“Tonight,” Logan confirmed. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Shona held his eye, brought the Pot Noodle to her mouth, and plugged down a big gulp of the sauce as he watched.

“How about now?” she asked, after smacking her lips together. “Still looking forward to it?”

“Strangely, even more so,” Logan confirmed. He checked his watch. “I’d better go see himself. He should be done by now.”

“He is, aye,” Shona confirmed. “They sent me his bollock twenty minutes ago.” She took a slurp of her noodles. “Want to see it?”

“What? No!” Logan yelped. He looked frantically around the room, like a giant cancerous gonad might be lurking somewhere, waiting to pounce. “Why did they send it to you?”

“I do the testing,” she explained. “What, you think they pay me to just sit around here waiting for murders to happen? I do have other responsibilities, you know?”

“No, I knew that, I just… Jesus.” Logan stole another look around the room. “How is it? The bollock, I mean? Is it…?”

“Don’t know yet,” Shona said. “At first glance, it looks contained—the cancer, I mean—but I wouldn’t like to say for sure. They’ve just sent me the one, though, so that’s a promising sign.” She inhaled some more noodles. “Unless they dropped one somewhere.”

Logan chuckled. “Unlikely, I’d have thought.”

“Sure, just you keep telling yourself that,” Shona said, and Logan couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not.

“I’d better shoot off,” he said. “Heather’ll be expecting me to check in.”

“That joke’s over,” Shona told him, and the way she held her fork told him he should probably comply.

“There was one good thing about seeing her again, though,” Logan said. “It made me realise something.”

Shona’s eyes narrowed. “And what would that be?”

He leaned in. Their lips met. There was no swelling music. No slow zoom. Just the smell of a Pot Noodle, and the sense that somewhere nearby, Tyler’s testicle was watching on.

“That I should’ve done that a long time ago,” Logan told her.

Then, he turned with the sort of dramatic flounce usually reserved for romantic heroes in historical novels, made it two impressive strides, then accidentally rattled his knee off the edge of a stool, and limped the rest of the way out of the room like Quasimodo.

* * *