‘Don’t you need to go back in there? Starting again at two, I believe,’ he said.

‘Oh yes. Shit. Two.’

Anita scrambled to shove the sandwich wrapper into her jacket pocket and scoop up her laptop bag to hurry inside.

‘See you,’ she said.

‘Yeah, see you.’

When the court rose at four p.m., Anita perched on a bench in the corridor to finish the day’s story for the paper and send it off. It only took her ten minutes but that was long enough for the rest of the media pack to have left the building.

When she came out onto Phillip Street, Rohan was waiting there. He was waiting for her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

They walked through Hyde Park and then up to where Rohan’s car was parked at the Surry Hills police station, stopping by a supermarket to buy food to cook dinner at the Alexandria apartment Rohan shared with a flatmate.

His place was in a group of neat, uniform residential towers built on old industrial land, resembling a plantation forest that had sprouted in a flat paddock. Those apartment block clusters always made Anita think of an architectural sketch and she pictured herself as a line drawing of a human figure included to indicate scale and the potential of life existing in the development. Well, there were now two human figures walking through the building foyer—her and Rohan Mehta, carrying groceries and intending to have a lot of sex.

The flat was tidy and perfectly comfortable, if a little impersonal. The flatmate travelled so much for his marketing job, he was rarely there, and it was clear Rohan was really only using the facilities of the place rather than occupying it as a home.

That Friday night spilled over to the entire weekend. They stayed in bed for much of the time but did venture out for food. They also went walking, including a hike to Anita’s flat to fetch more clothes.

They fell easily into the rituals of a fresh relationship, including the traditional telling-of-the-romantic-history. Anita did her routine about the string of unfortunate men she’d chosen in her twenties, including Secretly Married Martin and The Masturbator. In her early thirties, in London, she lived for two years with an Australian guy, an intellectual property lawyer, and there’d been talk of babies and real estate back in Australia. But when she returned to Sydney, he never got around to booking a flight. Underneath all their plans, the flesh of the relationship had atrophied without them realising. They agreed to let it go.

Up until a year ago, Rohan was living with the girlfriend he met at uni and, like Anita and London-based Lawyer, they too had talked of babies and real estate. He had no clue she’d been sleeping with her old high school boyfriend for six months.

‘Does that make me a shit detective?’ he asked Anita.