‘For the record,’ she tells him, ‘I am absolutely serious. There are two things as a writer that I know to be true. One is that even if you, as the author, don’t believe a thing your character says, people will assume that it is your truth and act accordingly. If your protagonist thinks live, laugh, love signs are basic, everyone assumes you think they are basic too, and by extension that you’re an uppity bitch. If your antihero hates olives and thinks anyone serving them at a party must have been born without taste buds, nobody will ever offer you a pitted kalamata ever again. Very few people can separate the book from the author, and it pisses me off.’

Duke chuckles again, and it’s not lost on Evie that she’s on a bit of a roll with making him laugh. It does something to her chest, the notion of amusing him.

‘What’s the second thing?’ he asks.

‘That I don’t mean to be a magpie or pick over the carcasses of stories that belong to other people, but it just sort of … happens. I write about humans, and also interact with humans on a daily basis. Well …’ She reconsiders this. ‘Mostly daily basis.’ There are stretches of time when she’s on deadline where she stays home, unshowered, only pausing to let the dog out into the backyard. But besides that, she does find it helpful to write in coffee shops, listening in to the conversations of others, or lingering in the locker room after a weights class, eavesdropping on small talk.

‘My seventh-grade crush once made an appearance in a novel, and I only realised I’d been imagining him as a grown-up and using all his characteristics after the book was published. The mannerisms of my hairdresser, I’ve used them before too. The bad behaviour of exes …’

He turns around at this. ‘What about fake exes?’ he asks. ‘When our fauxmance is a nomance, are you going to write about it?’

Evie rolls her eyes. ‘Be wary of the man who directly asks if you’re going to write about him,’ she says, but she means it good-naturedly. It’s her way of saying no. Honestly, not if she can help it. It’s too embarrassing. Something tells her that saying as much won’t go down well with him though, so she doesn’t.

‘What about you? Any unlived lives?’

They’re back down on the flatter terrain of the main city now. Right as Evie wonders what the time is – it’s too much effort to pull off her gloves and unzip the top part of her coat to retrieve her phone – a church bell strikes with three tolls. Three a.m. She’s been walking for hours.