He gives a small, inward groan then, so soft that only I can hear, but so deep it seems to come from the very inside of him, as though he sat down here because he can’t bear to be anywhere else and has just realised he can’t bear to be here either. He rises from the chair – its metal legs make a harsh scraping sound, a teeth-annoying screech – and he picks up the disposable cup and the napkin and the stirrer and takes them over to the bin by the cafe entrance. How touching: even in his sadness, his despair, he is polite enough to clear up after himself. He turns towards the station exit. My heart goes with him.

I see you, I want to say. I understand. How rare is it, to feel such an affinity with someone straight away? It happens maybe once, twice if you’re lucky – twice in an entire life that you see someone and something clicks into place and you think: yes, yes, you. It’s all about timing, as I remember. Falling in love is musical bumps – when the music stops, you plump yourself down on whichever cushion is nearest as quickly as you can in the hope the landing won’t hurt. I can recall the heartbreak, from my twenties, the yearning for men my own age who just weren’t ready, and the pain when a few years or even a few months later, you hear they have plumped for someone else and you think, why her and why not me? She’s no better-looking or nicer than me. Well, that was the way I liked to think of it at the time: surely it’s not me that’s the problem, surely it was just that my timing was off. It happened to me a few times in a row, perhaps that explains …

Caleb leaves through the automatic doors that are always automatically open. I watch as he turns right, passes the taxi rank and crosses the road by the mini roundabout. He keeps going past the BTP offices, past the young man who sits cross-legged begging on the far side of the road because he knows he is the other side of the boundary line between the BTP zone of responsibility and the area looked after by Cambridgeshire Constabulary and so it’s not up to the BTP to move him on. I wait to see if Caleb is going to go up the stairs to the bridge that leads to the shopping centre but instead he turns right and heads for the underpass. Maybe he’s going to walk over Crescent Bridge and along Thorpe Road; isn’t that where I—

A taxi swings round the roundabout, heading towards me, obscuring my last glimpse of him.