Fred was fast to reply to messages, which was one of many things I liked about her. We swapped texts back and forth to arrange for a dinner date – three days on from when Faith first texted her for me – but throughout the days in between we managed to keep up conversation often, too. She would text around her shifts and her modelling, and her ‘other work stuff’, which I strategically side-stepped asking her about. I reasoned that, worst-case scenario, I at least had that in my back pocket for the date. We’d planned for dinner but Fred had said she was waiting to hear back about a modelling gig – Cut-throat industry. Being naked for middle-class artists. Haha. Xx – so we left it until the day before to pin down a time.

The day before happened to be an evening with Rowan, though, and throughout the night – while intermittently grabbing my phone to reply to the woman I hadn’t stopped thinking about for days on end – I felt a new burden brought on by the whole thing. I flitted from Christ, what are we doing … through to Living our best lives, that’s what … in the space of half an hour – before again shifting back and forth between the two. Eventually, though, I changed tune to Is this right … when Rowan excused himself to use the bathroom and my first thought was that it meant I could at least reply to Fred’s message. I hadn’t really been present throughout the film and a half we’d watched. But I wasn’t convinced that Rowan – who’d replied to his share of messages, too – was entirely switched on either.

‘Have you seen Orange is the New Black?’ he asked, when he came back into the room.

I lifted my legs up for him to sit back down on his side of the sofa, then laid them out across his lap. ‘Not that I can think of. Why?’

He shrugged and grabbed the remote. ‘It’s about a load of women in prison. It seems like the sort of thing you and the girls might be into.’ I watched him click around the Netflix screen. ‘I’m not sure I’m bothered about this second film, babe, are you?’

I couldn’t tell him a single thing that had happened in it. ‘Not really.’ My phone buzzed and I snatched it up straight away. ‘Did you want to try a series instead?’

‘That prison thing has quite a few seasons, I think. Maybe five, something like that?’