I rolled my eyes and explained my various feelings, none of which sounded very strong or reasonable when vocalised to Dan, and described the strange event at Vivian’s apartment so as to better support these feelings.

‘Okay, that is interesting,’ he said.

‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘Hey, when you’ve been at Lachlan and Chris L’s place in the last few weeks, has Vivian, like . . . been there?’

He didn’t even blink. ‘Absolutely, yes,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

He winced for me. ‘But maybe they’re just friendsssss?’

‘Definitely. It’s so fine, it’s really not my problem.’

‘Because he hasn’t messaged you and you might never see him again?’

‘Oh, I guess,’ I said. ‘I meant – nothing.’

‘Okay.’

‘No, tease it out of me.’

He did the opposite, focusing on the salad. He hadn’t remembered cutlery, and was covering it up by claiming that it was a ‘hand salad’; we picked at sticky gherkins and potatoes.

‘I mean I could almost say the same about Chris L,’ I said. ‘I’ve only met him twice or something. I should do what I want.’

‘True,’ he said. Two strangers jogged past, a demonstration of social innocence, a model by which two people could pass by two others and everyone could choose their preferred level of involvement. ‘Wait, how is it not your problem if the world’s just a place where everyone does whatever they want, whenever they want to?’

‘No, Dan, enable me.’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m enabling you to do whatever you like, but in full knowledge of your actions. Imagine if you stumbled into doing something tragic and I didn’t help you know exactly what it is.’

More silence, no strangers.

‘It would be tragic if I fucked Vivian?’ I said.

I liked and loathed that, in this broken windows theory of dating, I was somehow responsible for our general moral health, determining what society permitted and what not.

‘I guess it would depend on how you did it,’ he said.

I was also troubled that Dan’s best advice aligned suspiciously with his horrible plan to spark friendship between me and Chris L, which I was hoping he’d just forgotten about. How long did a plan have to be inactive before you could consider it ‘not at all a plan’? I wondered how long before the Richmond Man would stop texting me, and whether the vaguely implied plans suggested by my rendezvous with Vivian had any distinction or value.

And what about the other plan, the shaky plan of me, to send me out into the world in search of love and friendship? Was there another life out there where people could just ‘be’ without being influenced by the plans of other people, without being positioned as participants in their schemes? I guessed this was what was called conspiracy thinking. But living with Dan meant being involved, unmistakably, at least in certain domestic-grade conspiracies. I was sure that whatever they were doing, Chris L and Vivian had not so much as the slightest ‘plan’ for each other, not either of them. Their summer would be purposeless, relaxing.