“Oh? Well. They’re funny like that in here.” He smiles, and she is glad to see him. She needs someone familiar today. “Listen”—he gestures behind him to the crowded restaurant—“I’m just on a break. You fancy a coffee?”

As they queue, she scans the crowd: people of all ages, clutching laptops beneath their arms, tapping away on phones, all with those same see-through bags. She orders her coffee and as Nathan orders himself a cappuccino, double shot, she thinks of Hannah—no coffee, no booze, not for years now. She used to wave the wine bottle in her face—Go on, Han, surely a little won’t hurt—but by now she has learned not to. How many years have they been trying? Four? Five? She has lost count.

In the early days, when Hannah and Nathan first started trying and nothing was happening, she remembers Hannah weeping one evening. But I’ve worked hard. I’ve worked so hard all my life. And her saying something back, like, Of course it’ll happen. It has to. It’s you two, isn’t it? as though the universe gave two shits whether or not you’d worked your arse off and paid your taxes and your TV license fee, whether you were the deputy director of a large global charity, and married to a lovely man who was a senior lecturer at a leading London university, and if you put your hand up first in class. What she had wanted to say was, Bad things happen to good people all the time. Every day. Do you watch the news?

“So,” Nathan says, letting Lissa go first as they thread their way towards an empty table. “What sort of course?” He sits down before her and she sees his eyes are tired. But he looks well, still has something of the boy in him, still wearing the same flannel shirts he wore twenty years ago, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Even his hair has hardly changed, thick and dark, cropped close to his head.

“Ah . . . well.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Um . . . film.”

“Film?”

“Yes—it’s a . . . PhD.”

“A PhD? Blimey. Careful. You can cut yourself on those things.”

“Yeah. So I hear.”

Now she has lied. She should feel worse, but she feels marginally better. Why not? Why not do something different? Why not change her life?

“Hannah didn’t mention it,” says Nathan.

“No, well, it’s quite a new idea.”

“So, tell me,” he says, his gaze meeting hers.

“Um.” Lissa stirs sugar into her coffee. “It’s a sort of . . . feminist appraisal. Using the—you know, the Bechdel test . . . looking at films now and in the seventies, and . . . the forties. Comparing parts for women. How they’ve shrunk. Changed. All About Eve, Network . . .”

“Network. Isn’t that the one where he dies on-screen?”