‘What’s even up with him? A girl, or no money, or …?’ Emil tried to imagine what other problems you could have, but the effort of empathy was too great.

‘Both of those, a little,’ said Steffi, waving to get the attention of the driver. ‘I’ll explain when we get there.’

The car conveyed them through the nightscape dotted with other strangers: a drunk guy being helped along, a couple bickering next to an old stone church. They went past a place on the right whose name she recognized, some sort of club or rock venue she thought; she didn’t go to music shows much because it was a lot of standing and also very loud music made her teeth hurt, which she had never told anyone. She had a lot of minor secrets; everyone did. She wondered exactly how much of James’s despair she could ‘explain’. What did she actually know about him? Well, more than most people would probably have picked up, thanks to the combination of detective instinct and insomnia. She knew that James was paranoid about personal hygiene, because she’d once caught him googling a product that kept you sweat-free. Not caught him, just glanced at the screen, walking into the kitchen, and he’d jumped as if she’d seen him logging on to a terrorist chatroom. That he wore dark shirts when he went out on dates; that he was on at least one dating app, hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since he was dumped, or a serious job since his friend screwed him over: this much she knew just from the bad night, the night with the crying.

James had always been a pretty easy person to live with, if that was even the phrase for it. Their lives only intersected through an Amazon package handed over, a how are things in the kitchen. The reassuring crunch of his key in the door late at night. His behaviour recently had been a little erratic. He would get up in the early hours and do things that made no sense at 3 a.m., like heating up a lasagne or spraying himself with aftershave. He paced up and down, sometimes, between the kitchen and her bedroom. He couldn’t have imagined she was awake to witness any of this, because he didn’t know how little she normally slept. The polite exchanges of their mornings and evenings; the strange, unacknowledged shadow-routine of the nights.