Halfway through January he rang to tell her he wanted to make a reservation for the two of them at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Clerkenwell. Leah was in her bedroom, folding laundry on the futon. She took the phone over to the window and answered the call with her forehead pressed against the glass.

‘What do you reckon? It’s meant to be really cool, they do all sorts of weird bits like the nose and the trotters.’ Chris was developing a taste for gourmet dining. If Leah objected to the expense, he would reply that it was his money and this was how he wanted to spend it. Then he would make a quip about how bad the food was going to be in Afghanistan. ‘I’m filling up on the good stuff while I can,’ he would say. This was unanswerable, so Leah found herself suffering overpriced, cream-and-butter-heavy meals whenever Chris came to London. After two of these dinners she had secretly made herself throw up, something she had promised herself and her parents and her childhood GP that she would never do again.

Now, standing at the window, it was the thought of this restaurant as much as the thought of Chris that emboldened her to say, ‘Actually, I don’t think I want to.’

‘What, you’d rather just have a quiet one? That’s okay, we can go on Sunday instead, maybe lunchtime?’

‘I mean I don’t want to go at all.’

‘Oh. Right, okay,’ said Chris. ‘So … what do you want to do?’

The words were already there; she’d played them in her mind a thousand times. It was just like diving into an outdoor swimming pool: you focused on the mechanism of the dive, not on how cold the water was going to be. One little sentence, a single articulated exhalation – that was all she had to do—

‘I don’t think this is really working for me any more.’

‘What? Sorry, I didn’t catch that – you’re breaking up – my reception’s a bit dodge—’

Trembling now, she said it again. This time he heard her.

‘Oh. Right. I see. Right.’ There was a short spate of muffled coughing. ‘I see,’ he said again.

‘Sorry,’ said Leah. She knew she should say something more than just ‘sorry’, but she couldn’t think what. She looked out of the window for inspiration. There was a patch of grease on the glass where her forehead had been. Leah put her index finger in the middle of the greasy patch and smeared it round in a spiral. Somewhere she had read that if you drew spirals it meant you were sexually frustrated.

‘Leah? Are you still there?’

‘Yes. Sorry. Yes, I’m here.’ She was starting to feel panicked.

‘Can I – can I ask why?’