Hamza Hassan, or Za Flow, as it pleased him to call himself, had been Clio’s ‘secret lover’ from 2005, it seemed. Not long after Neil and Clio had had their one, drunken night, she had taken this much, much younger man, all muscle tone and eyes and hip-hop fashion, into her bed on the regular. Neil thought of himself at almost forty; he’d been in far better shape than he was now, but he was no 22-year-old rapper. Za Flow at thirty-six was in better shape than Neil had been at twenty-two. A quick search of the reviews of his latest album seemed to suggest he mattered, too; serious music magazines, big-name journalists that Neil had always respected, praising him for melding political sensibilities with humour and intelligence, for well-constructed basslines, an ability to marry a catchy party hook with hard-hitting lyrical content. A young beautiful boyfriend with a brain, who’d shared her two passions. Who she’d actually been able to make music with. Neil should have noticed the Northern Lass collaboration himself. This should have been his story to break.

Gogsy Duke. Danny Mansfield. Now this. She had a type. Let’s just admit it. Pal. Mate. Clio Campbell wanted alpha males. She hunted them down, their swagger and their pull. Their money. All this time, you’ve been dreaming you were locked in a love story for the ages, that one day she’d finally down tools and commit. To you? You were a drunken mistake. A puny little accidental shag, a chancer who got lucky one night when she was down. Weren’t you?

Remember me well.

None of them made her happy, though, did they? She was too restless, too wild for Gogsy or Mansfield. Who knows what happened with this one, but Neil had a funny feeling it wouldn’t have been a fairy tale. Of course, nothing had made her happy, in the end. That was sort of the point, wasn’t it?

He filed his word count on the ‘hunky grime star’ to the online ed like a dutiful little typewriter, then muttered to Carol he was off to finish the Saturday feature at home, left her to deal with Craig’s bluster and babble about presenteeism alone. Even back in his flat there was no escaping Clio. The door she’d hovered in all those years ago. That space near the bed where her weird cowboy boots had sat. The CD case for The Northern Lass was still sitting out; he scanned the liner notes quickly, and there it was, tacked on at the end – ‘For H, always’.

The Twitter notification, turned back on on his phone at Craig’s insistence, started chiming again, and he wondered when all this would stop. Three days now, of nothing but Clio, grinding away in his head.