Callum was one of those men who cook competitively, with loud remarks about ‘plating up’ and the joys of offal. He bought his olive oil in huge square cans and shopped in Borough Market at least once a fortnight. This evening he was doing one of his staple dinner party menus: scallops on a minted pea puree followed by slow-cooked rabbit ragout, with panacotta (dead simple, actually) for dessert. When the buzzer buzzed, he was up to his elbows in rabbit, picking through the mess of meat to check for the smaller bones.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Tamsin quickly, even though Callum was already wiping his hands clean.

Tamsin had managed to keep her face neutral when Callum told her he’d invited Chris round for supper. Really, she was terrified – terrified that Chris might recount, as an amusing anecdote, the real story of how they met, and expose her version of their history for a fiction. She needed to tell him not to tell – but she had no idea how to communicate this with Callum in the room. Now she hurried over to answer the door, half-hoping to whisper a warning to Chris before he entered the flat.

‘Hi, hello,’ said Chris, stepping towards her. He paused, moved his head from left to right like a tennis player waiting to return a serve, coughed twice, then thrust out his hand.

‘Hi,’ said Tamsin, as they shook. She felt afresh the strangeness of seeing this figure from the almost-forgotten past. Without the makeup and the nurse’s outfit, he looked much more like the boy she remembered, although he was older now, with a man’s broader frame and a strong neck thickened by exercise. There was something unnatural about his physique, as if his muscles had been inflated very suddenly: Clark Kent transformed into Superman. His T-shirt had clearly been bought for a scrawnier version of himself.

Impossible, she realised, to say anything to Chris now. ‘It’s, er, nice to see you,’ she told him. ‘Again.’

Chris nodded fervently. ‘I know, it’s so weird, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever—’

‘Come on through, come on through,’ she said loudly, desperate to prevent his sentence from heading any further in that particular direction.

‘Chris, hi, good to see you again, mate.’ Callum waved to them from the little open kitchen, jovial but distracted. ‘Tam, I can’t find the bloody mint leaves. They’re not in the fridge, they should be in the fridge.’

Tamsin stepped over to the fridge and produced the packet of mint, eyebrows arched.

‘God, I hate it when you do that,’ said Callum, coming up behind her and putting his arms round her waist.

Tamsin twisted round in his arms so that she was facing him. ‘It’s because your peripheral vision’s no good.’ Her tone was pertly flirtatious. ‘Men didn’t need it, you see, when they were chasing woolly mammoths.’