Michaela envied people who could nail an admin task quite as fast as this girl had set up the Facebook campaign. She’d got out of the habit of organizing things when she was with James. Nowadays she had to bluff it at the gallery when people sent Google Sheets or made her sign into Doodle or whatever the hell the new one was called, which made you remember about nine passwords just to arrange a meeting with someone who was sitting next to you. Yes, Michaela felt it really should be her who was launching this online rescue attempt. But what would Phillip have made of that? His eyebrows would have lifted clean off his face.

Even now, she didn’t think he was asleep; she could picture his scornful face against the headboard, ready with some bon mot about how 5 a.m. was an unusual time for a bath. He thought baths were ridiculous at the best of times. He was a showerer. Baths made no sense, he’d said during one of their first dates, because you were just lying around in your own dirt. But what about the joy of it, she’d countered – wanting to hold her own against this man. He had already ruled that three films she quite liked were ‘overrated’, as well as one type of cheese and one breed of dog. And he’d managed to talk down Israel but also online liberals who were too pro-Palestine so she had no idea whose team she was meant to be on.

‘What about the … just the fun of being in the bath? Or are Germans not allowed fun?’

He’d broken into his huge laugh, an even more distracting laugh than her own – a noise she loved getting out of him. Then and now. ‘No, you are right. We are only allowed fun on holidays and we have to fill out forms first.’

The bath here was a beauty. The water pressure was amazing: it came out like an espresso machine, the estate agent had said – speaking in English, for her benefit. It was a weird thing to say, because nobody wanted to imagine they were bathing in coffee, but Michaela remembered it every time. The agent had gone on to show them the view the bathroom window gave of the Landwehr Canal, which was becoming very expensive to live on, so this was a bargain. Michaela wasn’t really listening to that bit. She’d been enjoying the thought that she could lie here naked, looking down on people walking their dogs or jogging far below, and they would never know.