‘You know, that’s the most hospitable thing you’ve said to me in months? Just because I’ve kind of taken Gordon’s side doesn’t mean I’m your enemy.’

‘Don’t they mean the same thing?’

‘Not with me.’

Overcome by a bulge of shame, Kelly ordered herself not to cry. Hearing that Lou did not consider herself her enemy gave rise to an equal and opposite force: the intuition that Lou might be her friend. To her surprise, Lou, who had shown her nothing but wall-eyed contempt since moving in, sat beside her and raised her arm, like a drawbridge to the firmness of her shoulder. A shoulder to cry on. And she had plenty of it. Kelly eyed it like a pillow, and then, wearied by all the hours of conversation she could abridge with just one gesture, let her head rest on it.

Lou patted the top of Kelly’s head, in the unnatural but polite way a non-animal person would stroke someone else’s pet.

‘I know I came in late on all this, so tell me to mind my own business,’ Lou said. ‘But Dog? Really? What was in your head?’

‘You don’t want to be in my head,’ Kelly said, her voice wavering. She had nobody to talk to.

‘Wouldn’t you have spent all these years thanking your luck? I know how it ended with him, but didn’t you dodge a bullet? And it’s so long ago! Why would you go back there at … at your age? When you have revenge sex, you’re not meant to have it with the person you’re taking it out on.’

At her age was what explained everything. Lou just didn’t know it yet.

Kelly watched her hand chipping pieces of bark off the log and moving them across her lap, as if arranging samples. ‘When you get to my age, your unfinished business becomes more important than your happiness or whatever.’

Lou scratched her armpit and paused, it appeared, to extract a sea louse.

Kelly sat upright, dusted the bark off her lap, and began to tell Lou what had happened, if only to disabuse her of the idea that the sex meant anything. The sex was the least of it, the revenge even less. At times, with anyone younger than twenty-five, it could seem like you had to explain the entire human condition in order to get to square one.