I’d already had way more than my quota of showers, but I had another one, and dried myself thoroughly on the bath sheet I’d had the foresight to hang on the balcony so it dried all stiff and scratchy in the summer wind. Was it believable that an honest person could spend this much time under water? I could build a case for it. You worked out how to live – these recreational showers – and hurled your capital into it, and against, too, such forces as would have you removed from these showers, clothed and out of doors.

But when I came downstairs, that was almost where Dan was – halfway out the door, with the bowl of parent salad in his hands.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You just got home.’

‘I know I did,’ he said. He looked at me expectantly. ‘Come on, I’m hungry.’

I put my shoes on, too pleased that we were going on an excursion to point out that it was probably not the best use of his time to stand in an open doorway, waiting for a person who did not know you were waiting, to head out on an excursion they did not know would take place.

We walked into the park and found a quiet possie by the fountain, on a sweet spot between open lawns where anyone could see us and the full dark ranges of vertiginous trees.

‘I’m on holidays,’ he said.

‘Oh yeah!’ I said. ‘Happy holidays, Dan.’

He had worked right up to Christmas Eve, this was the way of the workplace.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you!’ He smiled. ‘What’s been happening?’

I could not describe this nothing week, that would be disastrous, so I took a deep breath and delivered an old rerun that would not seem like a rerun to him. I told him about my Richmond friend, starting with the part about how in the car that first night he’d kept doing that thing where he looked over at me and looked away again. ‘I can picture it,’ he said. ‘Classic driver behaviour. What’s his name?’

‘Um,’ I said.

I showed him my phone, where I had saved the stranger’s number as ‘Richmond Man’. Dan told me that I couldn’t save the stranger’s name like that, because if you web-searched for ‘Richmond Man’ you’d just find details of various bloody deaths, the kind that left you identifiable solely by your location and gender. I had thought of it more like Mitochondrial Eve or the Encino Man, two creatures known for their dignified anonymity, but we did a search for Richmond Man and the problem was real.

‘But anyway,’ he said, ‘you like Vivian, so who cares?’

My mouth dropped open.

‘It’s not true!’ I said.

‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew it that day at the pool. Yes,’ he said, to underscore it. It was all so unnecessary. Why could he not reveal it nicely, this enjoyable intimate knowledge, as opposed to glowing in mean-spirited triumph?