The unexpected relief of that thought. It was weirdly freeing. I swiped the thread left and tapped on the menu. Delete Chat, I selected. Are you sure? my phone asked me. Did I not want to Archive Instead? Delete Chat, I tapped again, and then, just like that, it was gone.

Outside the toilets, Rachel was waiting for me. I thought for a split second about pretending not to see her.

‘Oh God,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

I followed her through the now-rammed bar and up the stairs and out into the Shoreditch evening, the litter and graffiti and the neon lights, the bicycle repair yard 37opposite turned into a bar by night, all fairy lights and bunting, the Airstream trailers in the vacant car park now street-food vans. Deckchairs outside bars on scrappy squares of AstroTurf. The intermittent plane trees, huge and blotchy and recently pollarded, so alien when you really looked at them, just starting to sprout green leaves again. And the sky: that mid-May deepening blue, almost but not dark yet.

‘So,’ she said.

‘After what we think of as twilight,’ I found myself saying, ‘which is technically civil twilight, comes nautical then astronomical twilight. At certain latitudes and at certain times of year, and even here in London for a handful of weeks in May and June, because of the way the twilights overlap, there’s actually no night, and this is one of those nights.’

‘How drunk are you?’ said Rachel.

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I mean, yes, I am quite, but that’s not it. I just …’ I said, and I knew I owed her an explanation, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. It wasn’t even that she’d pity me, or think I was naive: I just couldn’t risk it getting round the agency, that I’d left my previous job after an affair with the married boss.

We were all clichés, really, when you zoomed out enough. That’s what my best friend and I used to say, before we sort of stopped talking.

That ache at the back of my throat. That constant, grinding loneliness.

‘I just—’ I said again. 38

‘No, listen,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s all on me. I somehow – must have …’ She stopped. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Honestly.’

We stood and watched the Shoreditch evening go by. The couples, the gaggles of girls arm-in-arm, or arm-in-arm-in-arm, stumbling along and occasionally into the road, where swarms of Deliveroo mopeds swerved and beeped. A homeless man was making his way down the road with a three-legged dog on a piece of rope, holding out a disposable cup, and generally being ignored. When he reached us, Rachel opened her wallet and took out a tenner.

‘Here you go, mate,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, love.’