They were women’s names and numbers. Who even were these women? I wondered if Chris L met these people through work, and if I should have spent more time making friends at uni before Dan graduated and took away my key social access point. It was depressing that the easiest ways for me to meet new people were hook-up apps and people who lived with people who Dan dated. I definitely had to make friends other than internet and sex people, but how would I greet a person who was neither of these things? I could talk to them about books or Dan or nature documentaries. I could go up to a person and say, ‘Surprise me!’

I couldn’t think of a way to ask Chris L for info about his friendships that wouldn’t seem creepy (‘Looks like you have some pretty interesting names in your phone’) so I resigned myself to a narrow life, a joyless tomorrow. The time we’d spent on the couch was already softening into the mentossy tones of a sleepover party. A dream I’d never had, a weird shadow of memory, like brushing our teeth together at the bathroom sink.

I stayed after the meal to help Lachlan stack the dishwasher; Chris L didn’t. Owing to the wine, I crashed on the couch Chris L had vacated in favour of sleeping in the adjoining apartment, the smaller place where he actually lived. This apartment I’d come to see was apparently destined to remain unseen.

If we lived in a world that was laden with poetic justice, the TV room I slept in would have shared a wall with Chris L’s bedroom, and I would have been woken on the strange couch by a buzzing in the night, and Chris L saying, ‘Yeah? . . . Yeah? . . . Now? . . . Are you sure?’, then the sound of Chris L letting somebody into the building, then the sound of many interlocking snaps and clicks and umphs, which despite their general nature clearly belonged to Vivian – the specific person whom I did not want to have produced the sounds.

Because we do live in such a world, that is exactly what happened. I stayed up for hours on my phone with the light turned down, regretting that I’d ever met Vivian or Chris L, going through Chris L’s internet photos in search of answers, wondering at the power of this unfathomable person, whom I could not respect but also could not understand. Where once I’d liked to look at Chris L’s Instagram when I needed a dose of something slightly acid, like a sting, I now knew too much about him to really get involved in the drama of the silver cape, its full ridiculousness.

I tried to look at my other favourite men of Instagram, who couldn’t go to karaoke or have a morning swim without it turning into a giant personal journey. They had to overcome a major struggle every day. Life isn’t so full of events, you dummies. Spend a day eating macaroni, before it’s too late.