“Long story short? Ferg mentioned my love of mountains and climbing, but neglected to mention that I only hike in the former and read about the latter. Or Sylvie neglected to take that on board, which I suspect was more the case. Apparently, she has a habit of dragging dates to the climbing centre in the hope that they’ll chicken out and just watch her perform.”

“You proper pissed on her chips, then,” Rosie said with glee.

Jem hadn’t thought about it like that. She had wanted to prove something to herself, not push Sylvie’s nose out of joint. “That might explain her buggering off to Hulme without me.”

“Are you bothered?” Rosie dabbed her lips with a napkin, her expression sombre.

“Not really.” Jem smeared butter on a fresh piece of toast. She took her time, spreading it right to the edges and cutting the piece into triangles. It helped her to qualify her statement with a degree of detachment. “I have form.”

“Form?” Rosie repeated, and then frowned as she caught the gist. “What? With dates dumping you?”

Jem chewed her toast. It had gone cold, but she didn’t want to waste it. “Not just a date, a girlfriend of six and a half months. At Milton Keynes, of all bloody places.”

“Wha—how?” Rosie screwed up her napkin, her meal forgotten. Jem pinched one of her chips.

“We were on the train, coming back from a weekend in London. Hayley spotted someone on the platform, some random woman she fancied more than me, so she got off and I never saw her again.”

“Jesus wept. What did you do?”

“What could I do? The train was leaving. She yelled at me not to follow her and disappeared into the crowd. All I had left of her was half a crap buffet car butty and her copy of Wuthering Heights.” Jem swirled another chip in Rosie’s ketchup and gravy. She hadn’t told this story in years, and she was heartened by how little it was affecting her. At the time, she’d gone home to sob on her dad’s shoulder, and the humiliation had lingered for months.

“Miserable cow,” Rosie said fiercely. “You’re better off without that one.”

Right up until this week, Jem had thought she was better off without anyone. Her most enduring relationship since Hayley had been a fling with a Polish paramedic who had fled back to Poland after a month because the damp Manchester climate made her hair too frizzy.

“Yep,” she said, keeping the latter point to herself. “Ferg got curious and Facebook-stalked her a while back. She got married to a very pale performance poet. In a yurt.” Jem finished her chip and blew her fringe from her eyes, and then snarled and clapped a hand on it. Enough was enough, she decided. She’d succeeded in one new venture today, so why not double or nothing? “Is Thornton’s still open?”