But now my life, too, was dangerously close to such eventfulness; I’d come to a dinner party and slept over on a couch! And, sometime in this chapter of this jeopardous adventure, the neighbour’s cat decided I was sufficiently chill. It hopped up on the couch, and then it cuddled in beside me, and then it was gone by the time I woke up.

After a while, I wandered into the strangers’ kitchen, where Lachlan was pulling the leftovers from the fridge. Last night’s taco filling was this morning’s tofu scramble, which I could not wrangle into an arresting metaphor for the uncertainty I felt around Lachlan this morning, just from having been around him lots the night before, at which time he’d revealed himself to be somewhat different from the person I’d semi-blindly assumed he was. I sat down at the bench and smiled shyly at Lachlan.

‘Stop smiling at Lachlan,’ Dan said, swooping in, fresh from the shower, trying and failing to casually shrug on his dressing gown. It was the familiar one, lush with deep green pile. Even here in Fitzroy I couldn’t escape it! He must have brought it with him from our house.

Dan saw me inspecting it. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot! What am I thinking?’

‘No,’ I said. I couldn’t stop looking at the gown. ‘I think I . . . like it?’ It was almost true; after constant exposure to this robe, and also to Lachlan’s, the piney, homey depth had finally seduced me. ‘I like the robe,’ I explained.

‘I think I’m done with the robe,’ Dan said. ‘I’m leaving it here in Fitzroy.’

‘That seems extreme,’ I said.

‘But I have to,’ he said enigmatically, ‘because it’s not mine.’

He assumed a scary expression. I would like to say that if the outside world ever saw this expression, Dan would find himself out of work, out of friends, and out of tofu scrambles; he would have to spend the rest of his life living under a troll bridge, dining on the braver pets and dumber village children.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Lachlan, tell him to stop.’

‘Please don’t make that face,’ said Lachlan.

‘I’ll stop if you open the pantry,’ said Dan.

It was such an awful face that I was genuinely frightened.

‘Why do I have to open the pantry?’ I said.

‘Why not open the pantry?’ said Dan.

I always lost games like these, because I didn’t care, not in these cases, and you could say this was the point of the game – who can care the most? – but if you go along with it, it becomes impossible to ever quit anything and still feel as though you have made a legitimate choice. Maybe it was this, Dan’s way of taking things too far, that had lent his relationship its sheen of survivability; if I could just hold out another day, another lonely weekend, their relationship would unstick from the far edge of the pan and sizzle into ether, never to be seen again. Now, with Lachlan becoming my ally this morning, this wish seemed both unlikely and cruel.