He took my hand. ‘I want us both to be sure.’

In those seconds while I looked at him, though, he was a stranger – and for the first time ever, I felt unsure. The man walked and talked like my boyfriend. But he bought flowers and made suggestions like the kind of men I told the girls to avoid. I’ll have to throw the roses out, I thought, but that would come later. In the lengthy silence that rolled out, I guessed he was likely waiting for enthusiasm or disgust. And I would have to be the one who made the final decision; I would have to be the person out of the two of us who made this an okay thing to do – or not. Because that was my role: The Reassurer. I sighed, realising that I sounded like the world’s shittest superhero.

I don’t know how much time had ticked by when Rowan excused himself to make tea. In truth, I thought he couldn’t hack the silence any longer and needed to be somewhere other than looking back at my catatonic stare. Does this count as an emergency? I wondered, while I tried to tally up how many months it had been since I’d last seen my counsellor. It would be short notice, but she’d always been good at fitting me in during a crisis. I was shaking my head again. And if this doesn’t count as an emergency, crisis, imminent existential dread, what does? I thought of asking Rowan what he wanted, then; whether this suggestion ignored what might be good for both of us, and instead only came down to him being able to buy a girl a drink and tell me about it, without me flipping a table. But I couldn’t get the question out and into the room. My counsellor had coached me: We’re not meant to ask things, if we’re not ready for the answers …

Chapter 9

Before

Every now and then, I’d see Rowan fidget. I thought I’d heard his mouth open once, too – the sound of dry lips breaking away from each other. But he didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say, really, once he’d told me. The explanation had rolled into more information than I was ready for until eventually I’d stopped him – ‘You need to shut up for a minute. Longer than a minute.’ – and we’d held a silence since. It was a séance, almost, while we both tried to search for the relationship that had most definitely been lost. I heard the neighbouring flats thrown open with life; another party or another study night or another—

‘Will the girls be back soon?’ he asked.