“Bit unethical?” I pointed out.

“True, but think of all the free chips you could eat.” Rhys’s expression told me that he was thinking of exactly that. One day, I wanted somebody to look at me the way Rhys looked at hypothetical free chips. Although to be fair, Oliver sometimes did.

“I mean,” said Oliver in the tones of a man who was determined to at least try to put the genie back in the bottle, “you’d probably still have to go to court, and even if you won, the time, effort, and lawyer’s fees would cost far more than the chips in the long run.”

Rhys, genie that he was, remained unperturbed. “You say that, but I can eat a hell of a lot of chips.”

“If you ate enough chips to cover the costs of a legal battle,” Oliver observed, “that might just count as evidence you formed the intent to withhold payment before consuming the meal.”

“It still seems like a weird loophole to me.” Ana with one n slipped off a trainer and wiggled her toes distractedly. “Have you ever actually got somebody off with that argument?”

“A couple of times.”

She winced. “Isn’t that a bit…dodgy?”

Oliver was used to this—so used to it that he’d brought it up unprompted on our first fake date. These days it made me get slightly prickly-defensive on his behalf, but I knew he could field it perfectly well himself.

“I appreciate it might seem that way,” he said, “but…well…to take a recent example, a little while ago I ‘got somebody off’ for exactly this reason. I can’t go into details, but the case I made was that my client and her boyfriend only formed the intent to leave without paying because they grew frustrated at the staff consistently misgendering her. She admitted it wasn’t the right thing to do, but she was very upset at the time and she found the whole process of going through a court case deeply traumatic. I don’t think that being convicted of theft would have made her a better person. I don’t think locking her up or fining her would have protected anybody. So, no, I don’t think it was dodgy at all.”

Ana with one n seemed unconvinced. People usually did. “But then shouldn’t the defence be that ‘she had a good reason,’ not ‘she happened to eat the food before she decided not to pay for it’?”