A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you? … Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”

“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.

I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner—Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”

All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.

After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”

“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”

“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”

I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”

“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”

Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you—”

“No, Dina, I’m not. I was seeing someone until recently, we broke up, I’m not planning on getting back in the saddle for a while. OK?”

“I didn’t know,” Dina said, a lot more quietly. “Sorry.” She subsided onto one arm of the sofa. “Do you still talk to Laura?” she asked, after a moment.

“Sometimes.” Hearing Laura’s name filled up the room with her perfume, sharp and sweet. I took a big swallow of coffee to get it out of my nose.

“Are you guys going to get back together?”