A month after I had walked out of Eve’s flat, I bumped into her on the street on the way back from work. Something made me lift my eyes from the squashed Coke cans and sandwich wrappers strewn across the pavement and there she was, wearing a new black coat belted tightly at the waist, and a distracted expression. The shock of her quiet beauty hit me like a glass of ice-water in the face. She saw me out of the corner of her eye a second before she passed me by. We stopped and stared at each other. For a moment I forgot to be angry. What had I been angry about anyway? I couldn’t really remember. Oh yes, I had been angry because she got a new job without telling me first. Was that it? Was that all? What an eejit I was.

It filled me with such elation to see her again that my head swam, and all the words floated away from me.

‘Do you want to go somewhere for a coffee?’ I said.

‘I’ve got to be at work in twenty minutes,’ she said.

My heart fell.

‘But it doesn’t matter if I’m ten minutes late,’ she said.

In the café she ordered coffee and a slab of coffee cake from a sleepy-eyed waitress with two limp hanks of blonde hair. It arrived surprisingly quickly, and after a couple of mouthfuls she pushed the plate over to me.

‘You have some,’ she said, and handed me her fork.

I took a mouthful, and then another. It was fantastic cake, bittersweet and moist, with a fudgy buttercream that slid recklessly all over the inside of my mouth. I could have eaten that cake all day, and then fallen asleep with a wedge of it jammed in my mouth.

‘That’s the best cake I’ve ever eaten,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘I might have eaten a better one and forgotten about it, or I might even be lying.’

‘I can see from the expression on your face that it’s the best one,’ she said. ‘And it’s the best one I’ve ever eaten too, so it’s probably also the best one you’ve ever eaten.’

‘How do I know that there isn’t an even better cake out there in some pastry shop, waiting for me to go out and find it?’ I said.

‘There can’t be,’ she said. ‘If this tastes like the best, now, then it just is the best.’

‘Have you eaten a lot of cake?’ I said.

‘Not that much, but enough to recognise a really good one when it comes along,’ she said.