Karl was waiting for them at dusk, in the faux-Himalayan bar the Hilton had in their lobby. After one glance at the two of them – unkempt and ragged, sweaty, at the edge even of their near-boundless patience with one another – he broke out into a high, keening laugh. It was a laugh with an unaccustomed note of guilt in it. ‘Oh, man,’ he said, ‘I thought you would have stopped hours ago.’ James looked him up and down and understood that Karl – spotless in his jacket and T-shirt and crisp blue jeans – was very good at doctoring photos, very good at technical trickery of all kinds, had the evidence of a long drinking session around him, and hadn’t been anywhere at all. He wondered if Michaela would work it out, too, because if she did not, he definitely wasn’t going to tell her.

*

Michaela had stayed in the bath for almost an hour and a half in the end, close to her personal record. She’d topped the water up three times. She had thought about the Monopoly day and the unwanted matcha lattes and the warm feel of him in the bed. She had watched the feed of James news, the now almost minute-by-minute updates, the false starts and red herrings. His picture; the striped rugby jumper that Michaela herself had bought him. It looks silly, he’d objected, me in sports gear. You don’t have to play rugby, you idiot, she’d said. Just look good in it. He did look good in it. The wide stripes, although they were meant to be unflattering, had given him an appealing teddy-bear look, and there was something much more genuinely manly about him than the people you saw shouting their mouths off in football shirts. She’d always known better than James himself where his best qualities lay.

That thought, at about the ninety-minute mark of the bath, had prompted her to try James’s number again. Her texts were saying ‘Delivered’; it was something to hold on to, it was better than the forbidding silence, the gloomy green boxes, of earlier. And this time something in the attempted call had been different too; something had felt different in the quality of the silence, the electronic deliberations. For ten seconds, as adrenalin coursed through her, Michaela thought she was going to be able to talk to him – hours after that had ceased to seem a possibility. So long that she didn’t have a clue what she would actually say, other than to beg him: stop this. Don’t do this, darling. The skin stood up on her bare arms.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘James, hello?’

But no. The person you are calling, the non-voice had begun, and Michaela had shouted, ‘Fuck me’, and dropped the phone over the side of the bath.

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Are you actually, actually kidding me,’ said Michaela to herself.