This was another of Pete’s qualities that I found both attractive and repellent, the way he was willing to cut something off or out so mercilessly.

He told me once that he had had an ant farm as a child. He was enthralled by it, he said. He would stare, fixated, as the ants constructed intricate tunnels behind the glass, through the white sand.

But then the ants had started to die. The living ants dug a chamber where they would carry and dump their dead. It was depressing, Pete said. Each day the pile of dead grew and the number of live ants shrank.

In the end he picked up the thing and shook it hard enough to make all their tunnels collapse. He couldn’t stand the thought of waiting until the last ant keeled over, with no-one to carry it to the mass grave. He said he couldn’t remember ever feeling so relieved.

The final house was the one Pete most wanted to see. It was on a good street, a broad boulevard that rolled into the town centre. Cilla’s hatchback slowed down at an amber light instead of accelerating, and Pete gnawed his bottom lip in annoyance.

By then the sun was lowering. It was the dirty end of the afternoon, when your collar is grainy and your lunch is sitting low in your stomach, and you begin to question whether you’ve done anything worthwhile with the day, with any of your days.

The urge to assess how well I’d used my time had only developed recently. When I used to play lacrosse I paid no attention to the time I’d spent, the percentage of my life that was gone. There was just school and training, and games on Saturday mornings. There was the steam of the showers. There were other girls’ sweaty heads butting up against mine while we whispered tactics or shared our fury or our elation. I remember their small, strong fingers pressing into my shoulders. I remember rubbing lotion into my aching thighs on the bus home. I remember that I didn’t have any doubts about my life and its purpose. But I can’t remember what it was I thought about. Did I even have thoughts then? Or did I just unfurl like an animal every morning with no need to think, only move?

We arrived. Pete switched off the ignition. We watched Cilla try to get out of the car, catch the tiny heel of her shoe in the door and then have to remove the shoe to free herself. Pete did his yoga breathing, inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other. He did it with a steely focus on Cilla’s little foot, her little shoe, her little car. He watched as she hopped to the kerb, still with a smile plastered onto her face.