She fished the phone from her back pocket and tapped at the screen. My own phone buzzed with her message, but I ignored it, a little distracted by what she’d said.

‘Why did you change the number?’ I said after a moment.

She shrugged. ‘Oh, it was just a security thing … they prefer you to do that when it’s been stolen … or whatever.’

I didn’t reply. I’d never heard that before. Plus, it was unlike her to blithely spend money like that; and then I remembered that she had been with Patrick and Julia yesterday. They would have given her the cash for the new phone.

Those were the kind of things that rankled a bit, much as I loved my parents-in-law. It was the assumption that they could just spare, what, seven hundred pounds like that. As though it meant nothing.

When dinner was ready, we settled in front of the Sky planner with our food on trays.

I got through my portion quickly and was rising for more when I looked over and saw that Anya had basically rearranged hers, barely touching her food.

‘Not hungry?’ I said and she shrugged.

‘Just a bit tired, is all.’

It was a strange evening, overall. I was aching all over from my earlier tumble and took myself off for a hot bath after we’d watched two episodes of a crime drama we’d been following. It was a good one, but watching the murder victim being covered in dead roses by the masked killer who had been hiding in their attic wasn’t exactly a mood-lifter.

Before I went for my bath I looked over and saw Anya staring at the television with the oddest expression on her face.

It was a hard, angry look; quite unlike her, really. She’d turned the telly over to some sort of dating reality thing and it was almost like she was glaring at the contestants currently making idiots of themselves.

‘Hey, you don’t have to watch that, you know,’ I said and for a second she snapped her gaze towards me in a way that made me stop in the doorway. Her face relaxed into a smile then and she gave a big yawn, arms above her head so the baggy sleeves of her favourite cardigan slipped down over her slim, freckled arms.

‘I like enjoying the discomfort of others,’ she said with a grin. ‘Plus, I get to be really judgemental.’

‘Well, I’ll leave you to your schadenfreude,’ I said as I went through to the bathroom.

‘You and your fancy book learnin’,’ she said, in a daft American accent, before throwing a cushion at me.

She went to bed before me and I thought she was asleep when I came in later. I was a natural night owl and Anya was the opposite. I slipped gingerly under the duvet in the dark, wincing as my knee stung and my lower back throbbed.