So, like a creep, I staked out the apartment, hanging out at a bar where I could see the mouth of the street. I was wearing my sunglasses but they were no protection; they didn’t hide the shape of the person, only their intentions.

Just as I was giving up, my pint gone flat and warm, I saw the old, mysterious shape exit the apartment, an alluring stranger in a storm of teal. My instinct was to duck, but my action was to freeze. He passed me without looking, holding a green bag.

I tailed him at a safe distance into the Smith Street Coles, where Dan had either gone or not gone in quest of sherry vinegar. But I couldn’t find him when I snuck in.

I wandered down the health food aisle, and down the aisle of snacks, and down the aisle of rice and soups, and through the stacks of fruits.

There were all kinds of people here but none of them was him.

When I looked at my phone, the message had come in ten minutes prior: ‘Don’t follow me,’ it said.

‘Chris L,’ I wrote, ‘I just want to talk to you.’

No reply. I wandered home, defeated.

Later that night, the reply came: ‘Why?’ he wrote.

I didn’t know what to say. What was I doing? It was ridiculous.

‘Because I live with Dan?’ he wrote. ‘So we should all be friends?’

When he put it like that, it sounded pretty specious. And it wasn’t even the real reason; I wanted to be friends with him, not him-among-the-many. This I could admit to myself, definitely not to him.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I texted.

‘Is there anything else?’ he wrote.

I let the screen go black.

Dan finally came by to clean the gross dregs of his bedroom and pick up the last of his things at the latest possible moment, the night before my Richmond friend was scheduled to move in. He managed to bequeath me all his least-appealing plants.

‘You don’t want them,’ he said happily.

‘I really don’t,’ I agreed. ‘Thank you, Dan.’

‘You won’t kill them, will you?’

‘We’ll all find out together,’ I said.

He crouched to wipe a skirting board and then looked up at me. ‘Hey, you said thank you.’

‘Ohhh, did I?’ I said.

I tried to play it cool, but the truth was that I’d taken his critique to heart, about thank you and sorry, because if we cannot be civil, then what can we be? It had been a conscious effort, and the words felt strange to speak, like an unfamiliar tongue touching the old familiar cavity. Thank you, I had started mouthing crazily. Sorry.