‘Yes.’ She watched him breathe in, then nod slowly. ‘You have exams,’ he said reasonably, graciously, ‘and after that who knows? We might end up in different places.’ He made this sound quite casual, though she knew there was nothing remotely casual about the way Jimmy pursued his goals. He was older than she was, having taken two years out to save for his uni fees and living expenses. But he would soon be graduating.

‘Right, that’s what I thought,’ she said with a spurt of courage.

This was good. He was agreeing. She should have been relieved. She was about to say more when the traffic light changed, commanding them to walk with its intrusive, harassing ticking. Oh shit, she thought, this is really it. The traffic light was urging them to go their separate ways. She would go to her room, and he would walk through the back streets to his aunt and uncle’s flat above their corner shop. The shop was a treasure trove, stuffed with everything you could think of, from shoelaces to bath plugs, exercise books, and the daily pallets of soft white bread that elderly customers preferred.

She had expected him to argue, or at least look upset. After three years together, how could that be it? People said that Hong Kong expat brats discarded relationships with hardly a moment’s thought, but when it came to it she had nothing on Jimmy. As she went up the steps to put in her pin code, he merely turned the other way to walk home in the dark.

Afterwards Phoebe went over their conversation in her mind. She wished he had said something meaningful, or even something vaguely on the spectrum of meaningful, a comment to parse later and find beauty in. But he’d given her nothing to work with. His reaction – or lack thereof – made her question whether he’d ever cared. Her insecurities flared up like a recurring rash.

‘He could have had the decency to pretend,’ she complained to her friend Grace. ‘He could have sworn at me. Or something.’

‘He cares a lot, you know.’

‘Right, of course. I know.’

When news of the breakup reached the rest of their friends, it caused a ripple of surprise. As a pair they were seen as an institution, an immutable fact of life. Their years together seemed a geological span of time. The Triassic, the Jurassic, the Cretaceous period… she’d spent more time in Geology gazing out the window than studying the Earth’s epochs. The campus of the International School in Hong Kong looked across the water to the stony spine of the Shek O Country Park, which in outline resembled a sleeping dinosaur or dragon. Meanwhile, the teacher went into great detail on the splitting of the continents, when they were carved off and mashed together in new configurations.