Before bed the night before, with the overhead lights off, her hotel room dark except for a shimmer beamed from the TV, Emily had watched a documentary about people who trained dogs to find truffles. Some farmers used domestic pigs for the task but, too often, the voiceover explained, these animals would discover the truffles only to eat them. Emily wondered what it might be like to see a pig swallow five thousand dollars worth of fungi. Crazy, what some people valued. Emily had three hundred and fifty pounds left in savings.

The bedside phone rang and she knew, somehow, that it would be Michael.

He said: ‘I don’t want this conversation to turn into an argument.’

‘It’s exactly the kind of conversation that ought to turn into a fight.’

‘This is difficult for me too.’

‘Oh, really? Then how can I make this easier for you?’

‘I’m calling from home,’ Michael said, his words sounding bruised. ‘I haven’t moved out yet. I don’t know. Hey, maybe when you come home I can meet you at Heathrow? What do you think? Or maybe not. Oh, another thing: I’d like to read a book of non-fiction. Short narratives I can dip in and out of. So is there something like that here in the flat? If not, give me a title and I can go to Foyles.’

‘You want a bloody book recommendation?’ Emily ended the call, as if discharging a soft valve, all too aware of how her heart was fully exposed to someone in the midst of—not a breakdown, not a mid-life crisis—but an idiot moment. It was simple to be rude to him on the phone, but it was less easy to be angry with him when she was alone, and he was in her head, and she didn’t want him to be there.

3.

Liam and Emily sat on the bed. They were dressed again. With his expression suddenly tense and his hands all over his face to cover the stress, he said: ‘Now I need to tell you something.’

‘Doesn’t sound good,’ she said.

‘I’ve been thinking about the Ladbroke Grove days. We were single most of that time.’

‘The people we knew were terrible. In fact, that’s still a problem I’m facing in London.’

‘Could it be, I suppose, that we never bothered with anybody else back then because we already got so much from our friendship with each other? We may as well have been a couple.’