He moved aside to let her out of the door, perhaps still not believing that she was going to leave, but as her hand went for the door handle he said: ‘Seems like you get a new interest for a while and then you move on pretty fast, that’s all, so I kind of wonder—’

‘Fuck off, Phillip.’

‘I kind of wonder how much longer of this before you—’

‘Fuck off and – and keep fucking off till you’ve got a bit more of a heart.’

She slammed the door so hard that it jumped partway open again. She heard her trainers echo on the stairs. She looked down at her phone, the stream of notifications. It was struggling with the workload: the battery was down at 9 per cent. The screen was cluttered with messages, rolling news like a TV channel, but – like one of those channels – almost all of it was noise, repetition. It took ten seconds’ scroll to determine that the networked cells were still all fizzing off one another, coordinated by Steffi. But another thirty seconds and 1 per cent of the iPhone’s energy confirmed that things had not really progressed, there was still no sighting of James, there was still just this international spider-graph of chatter.

Down the staircase through the neck of their building; out onto the street. Michaela slammed the outer door. She was breathing fast. Her limbs, caught by surprise, had begun spreading the rumour of the planned run: there were twinges of displeasure in her calves. But the breathing wasn’t about that. It was about the argument and the lava of feeling it had unleashed into her. The brief stimulation, the kick of the conflict, had faded. It felt like the dried sweat after exercise, cold and sad, and the morning sky – concrete-coloured, low – was not going to bail her out.

She thought briefly of Steffi, a stranger, sitting at Michaela’s own kitchen table, perhaps boiling what used to be Michaela’s kettle, labouring patiently to untangle a mess Michaela had helped to create. It was the right thing to do, quite obviously. It was the selfless thing to do and it was only necessary because people like Michaela had been selfish. She ground her teeth. She sparked her muscles into the first running steps, despite the opposition from the pit of her stomach, which had had no fuel but empty calories, booze, for almost eleven hours. Down the steps that brought you out on the Landwehr; nettles poking through a wire fence, discarded empty bottles, then the reward of the water. Fuck Phillip. Really, fuck him.