‘Yeah, of course. It’s great to see you. Sorry I’ve been busy this week. Picton and Worthing have really been…’ The sentence petered out and he took a sip of his beer.

‘How’s the clear-out? Have you managed to sell the console?’

‘No. Picton’s letting me keep everything there. He’s charging me per week, but I wasn’t going to flog it for nothing.’

‘He’s charging you?’

‘Yeah. But not that much, less than storage. Do you know how expensive self-storage is? Jesus.’

Petra nodded. ‘I know. Yeah. My mum and I brought way too much crap with us when we came here. Made the mistake for a couple of years of thinking we’d ever find a bigger place and unpack it. Ended up chucking most of it in the dump.’

‘Oh.’

Seeing his expression, Petra gripped his hands for a second on the table between them. ‘Not that that will happen to your console, though! You’ll find the right buyer. Our stuff was rubbish.’

The tap had just turned on again – they were talking and touching like they’d known each other forever. That’s how it had felt the minute he’d fallen at her feet; the way it had felt on Friday night. Again, she felt like she was talking to an old friend. Amazing how a few stupid lines on a phone and a couple of hours of silence could cause such anxiety.

Maybe he was married, maybe that was it. She imagined him ducking under the duvet when his wife went off for a pee late at night to send one word to her, like a prisoner waiting for the right moment to release a message tied to the leg of a carrier rat.

‘What’s funny?’ he asked.

‘Uh, nothing. So… uh, you live close by? Is this your local pub?’ What next, Petra? Do you come here often? Or, Do you live here in town? Remembering the way she’d snapped at her mother for asking the same thing.

He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Been here a few times – it’s near the studio, isn’t it? I don’t do pubs that often, to be honest.’

‘Yeah, me neither. I’d rather drink at home in front of the TV most of the time.’

A loud group of workers in high-street office wear – not wanky banker boys like you’d find in London, and probably not designers or advertisers or coders from Leamington’s soft industries who would be wearing more expensive casualwear – came clumping up the stairs and requisitioned a few tables at the far end of the room, scraping and battering wood on wood as they rearranged the furnishing.

‘You want to get out of here? We can take a walk, go sit in the dell?’

The little sunken park across the road may be nice enough during the day, when it was bright, but on a winter’s evening? And she wasn’t quite warmed up enough to invite him home with her just yet – that night had been special. ‘Well, we’ve got our drinks, let’s finish them. I like the fireplace here. That’s something I don’t have at home.’ Do you? she wanted to ask. Why not? Why shouldn’t she? She wanted to know about his life. So she did. ‘Do you?’