The place had been a power plant before the Wall came down. The mezzanine was lit by bare bulbs that poked out on wires between the exposed girders of the ceiling. Michaela and Phillip often came here for late drinks. The throb of music from the floor below always made them grateful they didn’t have to dance, didn’t have to ‘go out’, try to meet someone. When they finally did go home they would joke about how they’d outlasted all the teenagers, who came out full of talk but by one in the morning were slumped in alleys outside, texting, sobbing, vomiting.

Maybe this would have to stop if Michaela got pregnant. When she got pregnant. But this was a good consolation prize for now. There was time. Occasionally she did get scared that there wasn’t as much time as there should be. People on the internet told horror stories about what happened if you left it past 35. If you had to have treatments. But, as Phillip said, ‘Everything is horror stories on the internet. Remember when you googled the pain in your side, it looked for half an hour like cancer, but it turns out you just had a pain in your side.’

She’d never met anyone whose opinion she deferred to so automatically, wanted to defer to. When they came out of a film she waited to hear what he thought, and tinkered with her own review automatically. If there was a weird noise in the night, she would nudge him awake just so he could say it was nothing, it was just the building. None of this was very feminist, probably, but in all her previous relationships – including with James – she’d always been the one to take the lead. It was tiring, being that person. It had been a fun couple of years on the other side of it. Couple of years and counting.