ANITA WAS UNCERTAIN OF THE ETIQUETTE SURROUNDING an encounter like the one she’d had with Rohan Mehta. It hadn’t been a date and didn’t fall comfortably into the one-night-stand category. It was sex between sort-of colleagues, but last night wasn’t the equivalent of fucking a fellow journalist. She’d never slept with a policeman before. And the backdrop, the context, or whatever you wanted to call it—the killing of three loved ones—threw standard guidelines out the window. There was no accepted practice here.

She definitely should’ve handled things differently this morning: sat up in bed, said a decent goodbye to him, like civilised adults acknowledging a mutually satisfying but once-only event. By pretending to sleep and letting him leave, she’d allowed a murky gap to open up.

Around midday, he texted her.

Hi Anita. Thanks for last night. Rohan.

She responded immediately.

Well, thank you. Thanks for the lift home.

Ridiculous—as if the transport had been the notable part of the evening. She wondered if her tone was too prim, given the fact that the two of them had ‘rubbed their pink bits together’ as Stacey had always liked to call it.

A moment later, he sent another message.

No worries. And thank you for the comfort food.

She texted straight back.

Thank you for the comfort.

The second she hit send, she regretted it. Had she jumped awkwardly from polite to playfully suggestive? She didn’t want to give this very decent man the wrong impression, so she added a follow-up text: I’ll see you round the courts. Anita.

She waited for a reply but the phone was silent in her hand. Which was to be expected. Her last text didn’t require any response from him and, arguably, her message had a closing-things-off crispness, punctuating the exchange with a clear implication that their interactions would be purely professional from now on.

Then, after twenty minutes—had Rohan been considering how to respond or was he just busy with a work matter during those twenty minutes?—he replied: You will. All best, Rohan.

Anita glanced at that text several times over the course of the afternoon. Did the wording suggest disappointment that she was shutting down intimacy? Or was the ‘You will’ a clue that he was hopeful things would spark up again when they saw each other? Then again, ‘All best’ was quite formal, like the sign-off to a business email. Or did his ‘All best’ indicate he was being self-protective, having realised she was parking him back into the ‘colleague’ slot? Or were all the words in his text soaked with relief, glad that Anita had re-established a cordial, professional distance and he was therefore free of obligation to her?

‘For fuck’s sake, stop now.’