There was an incredibly awkward silence, during which time Ellen realized that – to add insult to injury – she urgently needed the loo. She scanned the room for items that could be repurposed at humiliating cost, while hoping they wouldn’t be in here long enough for it to come to that. The attic ran the length of their house, but was so full it seemed smaller, its eaved ceilings adding to the sense that the walls were closing in around them. Stringy spiderwebs decked the whole room. There was a clearing of ratty, staticky carpet, and a short path from this clearing to the door. There was another short path towards the skylight. The dead mouse remained, lying in state.

‘OK, so who’s got a phone?’ demanded Alexa.

‘I do,’ Jack said, brightly, producing one and prodding it. ‘Oh …’ He jabbed at it again. ‘No signal. I never have any signal upstairs.’ He looked stricken.

Ben raised his empty hands. ‘Mine’s downstairs,’ he added sheepishly.

Ellen instinctively patted the side of her upper thigh: phone! She took it out. ‘I do, but it’s almost dead,’ she said, looking at the sad little red battery icon in the corner. ‘Three per cent.’

She wished she’d had the presence of mind to plug it in before she passed out. With a twinge of shame, she vaguely remembered spending much of the bus journey home – while she leaned in the area reserved for pushchairs – stalking a girl she went to primary school with on Instagram. Ellen found that she often did this when she was drunk. Joanna Jessop was a doctor and had got married in a frothy ceremony in a converted barn in the Cotswolds last year. But a month later she discovered her new husband was having an affair, and then he’d left her for the other woman. Ellen knew all this because Joanna Jessop had recalled the whole devastating incident in a series of black-and-white pictures of flat whites and rooftop scenes tagged #survivor #reflection #affair #divorce #cryless #smilemore #keepyourheartopen. She liked to return to the sequence often to gather more details. She occasionally stalked the disgraced ex-husband but he was, understandably, less forthcoming on social media. He was very short. It surprised Ellen that he’d convinced not just one but two women to take a chance on him.

‘Shit!’ Alexa said, enunciating the ‘t’. ‘Mine’s downstairs too. Ellen, we need to think fast about how to use yours before your battery dies.’

‘Well, I guess we should call your landlord?’ Ben said, innocently.

The three tenants shared a glance. It was agreed, wordlessly, that Alexa would field this.

‘It’s just … he’ll go ballistic,’ she stated, weakly. ‘He’ll probably try to evict us on the spot –’