Michaela was wearing a one-piece burgundy outfit. She was barely in her seat before she’d ordered a raft of starters, all of which their server seemed hugely impressed by: ‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ he said, and, ‘Yeah, super good choice,’ and so on. James wondered if there was anything they could order which would make the waiter say something like, ‘I really wouldn’t have gone for that, personally.’ Michaela continued to make herself responsible for ordering throughout the evening, removing any sense James had that he was being assessed on what he was eating. She also made herself responsible for a lot of the chat. He’d met people who blathered away to fill silence, but it wasn’t like that with Michaela; he’d met people whose opinions suffocated the conversation, but it wasn’t like that either. She just seemed to have a sort of relish of speaking aloud, reading out bits of the menu, enjoying the sounds. ‘Chorizo is honestly the tastiest word, isn’t it?’ ‘Ooh, prawns, gambas. Yes please.’

James supposed it could be annoying to someone else, but it was exactly what he needed in a partner. He’d always aspired to be the sort of person with the confidence to speak without overthinking. It turned out that having a girlfriend with that quality was just as good. And she had large, beautiful eyes, which ignited in recognition of shared experience every time he said something about his life so far – even though he himself felt most of it was pretty banal. When he said, for example, that he’d been a coder – a computer programmer – but he hadn’t had the heart after the company broke up, Michaela nodded in eager solidarity. ‘I started out as a journalist, but everyone on my course was a psychopath; they all drank four or five Diet Cokes in the morning,’ she told him, as if this was one of the known signs of the pathology. When he said that he’d been with one or two people in a short-term way, nothing serious, he again seemed to have hit the right note. ‘I’ve only had one serious one,’ said Michaela, pausing between clauses to see off a mouthful of seafood with noisy appreciation, ‘… sorry, that was yum – and I probably wasn’t as serious about him as I should have been. But, you know. Good as a warm-up boyfriend.’ James yelped a little nervous laugh at the phrase, hearing all the naughty fun it implied at some unknown party’s expense, and too little of the sorry echo it might have one day.

The only question she really taxed him with was about the exercise course itself. ‘What’s your long game with this?’

‘Sorry?’

‘With the exercise thing, the whole health thing.’