All but James and Karl moved out of the flat after that, and by now James’s core friendship group was scattering too, on the various winds that always blew groups apart in their late twenties: marriages and children, New Zealand holidays that became permanent stays, nervous breakdowns triggering dramatic career changes, and so on. But even well into his thirties, now driving cars for a private hire firm and helping people fix their computers on the side, James would have said he was broadly happy, most of the time. There were still the nights out with Karl, when Karl came back from whatever monstrous job he was currently trying out. There were the Edinburgh trips; there were dates and little tentative romances. By now there were certain mental ulcers, too, rubbing away at him, flaring up. He was aware that he was a little heavier than he’d like, that a decade and a half of sitting down had left its mark on his body; he worried that it was getting late to meet the right person, that it was never going to happen simply by having pleasant chats with people in the back of his car. Once Michaela had entered his life, these problems, along with all other remaining ones, disappeared. But in time Michaela herself had then disappeared.

Despite being dumped by her, and thrown aside by Karl, James had never imagined himself as a person for whom unhappiness could be this thick and choking; a person who would go home at night and simply not know what to do with himself. He understood there would be crises, even in an unremarkable life, but it turned out there was something worse than the adrenalin of a crisis: the endless flat grey afternoon of depression. The terrible night he had cried in front of Steffi, three months ago, had been the first time he’d really understood how hollow he felt, and had been feeling, and would keep feeling. Even after googling ‘depression’ – an act which released a flood tide of pop-ups that said things like, It’s OK not to be OK and Take a mate for a pint, he would have thought it impossible that he would ever be desperate enough to call the Samaritans. Until the morning, midway through January, when he’d gone ahead and done it.