She was reaching for her phone when Elizabeth – without knocking – threw open her bedroom door with such force it knocked over one of her empty suitcases. ‘Hey!’ she said brightly. The dark mood she’d been in was already gone, and looking at her brilliant smile, Claire wondered if she’d imagined some of it. ‘Ready for some delicious home-made dinner?’ Liz asked. ‘Because I’m totally starved.’ She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, then looked around again. ‘Um … did you unpack?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow. I really need to show you how to decorate, don’t I?’

Not if this paint colour is any clue, Claire thought, but she kept it to herself. She’d quietly get a can of something neutral and redo things to the way she wanted them – no confrontation, no drama, no fuss. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’

‘How about mac and cheese with some chicken? It’s leftover KFC, but it’s still good, I swear.’

It did sound good. Claire hadn’t even realised she was hungry until her stomach started growling, and she slid out of the chair behind her computer and stuck her phone in her pocket on the way out the door.

Dinner wouldn’t take that long.

… Except, it did. Elizabeth was hell to cook with; she wanted everything done just right. Claire stuck the macaroni in boiling water, and Liz got upset and took it off the burner because she wanted to check the temperature of the water first. Claire asked why, and that brought on an insane volume of information about cooking pasta at just the right temperatures, and the physics and chemistry of food, and honestly, even as much of a physics junkie as Claire was, she couldn’t really apply it to box pasta with reconstituted cheese substance that sold for a buck a box. She just backed off and let Liz conduct all her temperature observations, mix the sauce, and generally obsess about getting the chicken chunks just the right size to go into the pasta once it was done. All this took about an hour, which was about half an hour more than Claire wanted to spend on mac and cheese, even if Liz added something she said were Chinese herbs and white truffle oil. In the end, it tasted pretty much like she expected, but by then Claire was willing to eat the box, too.

Claire took the cleaning up role, which seemed to suit Liz, and when that was done, she headed for the stairs.

‘Wait,’ Liz said. ‘So – you’re leaving? Just like that?’

‘What do you mean, just like that?’