Priya cut her off. “Bridge, I know you’re just being sweet and enthusiastic, but you do remember I’m with two people right now, yeah? And I don’t love either of them more than the other.” She upended the wine, found it empty, and tossed it casually into one of my many tossing piles. “Or, for that matter, more than I love my mum or my dad or my sister.”

“You’ve got a sister?” Bridge asked, surprised but weirdly happy. She didn’t like other people’s families quite as much as she liked other people’s romantic partners, but it was a close-run thing.

“Yeah, you’d get on. She’s really normal. Works in a bank. Anyway, the point is that I’d appreciate it if you toned down the nobody-can-be-happy-without-that-one-special-person thing just, like, this much”—Priya held her fingers so close together they were practically touching. “Because honestly I feel sort of judged.”

The only thing in the world that made Bridge sadder than her friends being sad was the idea that she might have had a part in making her friends sad. With a wail of apology, she dropped the tail-end of the Dairy Milk she’d been picking on and threw her arms around Priya. “I’m so sorry. I’m stupid and thoughtless and a bad friend and a bad—”

“Okay, easy, tiger.” Priya was giving Bridge the kind of friendly pat on the back that looked a bit like she was tapping out of a submission hold. “I’m a big girl and can look after myself. I just wanted you to be a smidge less…normative is all.”

Still a little teary, but finally working out that she’d been aggressively hugging somebody who wasn’t super keen on being hugged, Bridge pulled back. “And I suppose really,” she said, “you’re even luckier than Luc and me. Because you’ve found your special someone twice.”

Priya leaned around Bridge and gave me a conspiratorial look. “I’ve made it worse, haven’t I?”

“Probably.”

Bridge settled back on the sofa. “Made what worse? I just—”

From the hallway, there came the sound of the door opening, and for about eighteen seconds we were convinced it was burglars. Eighteen seconds, it turned out, was exactly enough time for Bridge to take cover behind a chair, me to stand around gawping like one of those sharks with the big mouths, and Priya to vanish into the kitchen, only to return with the largest, sharpest knife I owned.

Three seconds later, it became clear that it wasn’t burglars at all. For a start, we could hear them taking their shoes off and hanging up their coat, and it seemed very unlikely that a burglar would bother with those kinds of details. And to clinch it, we also heard a voice call out, “Lucien, are you home?”