All Anna could be bothered to make was an omelette, which was fortunate considering the meagre ingredients she had brought with her. She located her favourite copper-based frying pan (the one she had proudly bought herself with her first-ever paycheque and had looked after meticulously ever since) and turned on the gas hob, smiling to herself as she whisked the eggs. An omelette. It was the first thing she had learned how to make at catering college, even though she, as with every other student there, had scoffed at the idea that they didn’t already know this simplest of recipes – which was, of course, the point. Everyone thought they knew how to make an omelette, but to be a good chef meant first acknowledging that you didn’t know as much as you thought you did, and moreover that the basics were not beneath you. Because, maintained Madame Chaubert, their tutor, if you were too arrogant to acknowledge that one required a foundation of these basics on which to build, one could never achieve greatness. In her philosophy truly great chefs, even those at the top of their game, would always recognize that there was still much for them to learn. Therefore, learning to learn was the most important first step in a chef’s career, and what better place to start than with the ultimate simplicity of breaking eggs into a bowl?

Geoff, she remembered, had refused to make that first-day omelette, declaring that his parents hadn’t spent a fortune on college tuition for him to be taught something he’d been making perfectly since he was six, and threatening to take his complaints to the dean if Madame tried to force him. Then, when she’d told him he was welcome to do so, he had made an omelette faster than the tutor and ignoring all her advice, just to prove a point. It was one of the things that had drawn Anna’s attention almost immediately – his utterly unshakeable sense of self-importance. She’d been appalled by and attracted to it in equal measure; she, the quiet little mouse from nowhere who had arrived at the college with promise but the full belief that there was still everything to learn. That moment had turned Geoff into the king of the class and given him an infamy that defined his career, right from that early moment. Everyone knew who he was, and he loved it.

She should have known better, Anna saw now, than to be so easily dazzled by the shallow theatrics of ego.

Having eaten and wanting to avoid the dark grip of reminiscence, Anna found a renewed burst of energy. When the knock at the door came she was busy hoovering the carpet, having discovered that the threadbare patches weren’t all that bad, really. They could easily be hidden by a bit of strategic furniture placement and a new rug, certainly enough to satisfy the demands of Anna’s theoretical future tenants.