Just to say ignore the response from Elias for now. I am going to get my dad on the case and get him to help draft a message back. I’ll dig the tenancy agreement out of my emails. So basically don’t panic. I’ll keep you both posted. Hope you both have somewhere to stay!! Speak soon X

She sent it, then put her phone back in the zip pocket of her jacket. Five minutes until the train. She leaned back on the metal chair and watched a pigeon tack unevenly down the platform.

She spent the evening folded into her father’s sofa – he was not yet back, though she’d opened a red from the rack anyway, feeling a little decadent, confirming first via a quick google that it was a satisfyingly expensive one. She picked up the remote and flicked unenthusiastically through the TV channels, barely concentrating. Every few minutes she picked up her phone, prodded the button, and then put it down again.

Her father’s flat was a two-bedroom property inside a new build – and she’d lost count of how many of these he’d moved into since the divorce. He would up sticks on the slightest pretence: a pipe he swore whistled at dawn; a neighbour whose voice carried; a sticky latch on a balcony door. As always, this latest model was populated with furniture that she recognized from the house in Sussex – like the large mahogany coffee table that didn’t really go with the grey corner sofa (new) that she was sitting on. There was some evidence of her father’s fairly new girlfriend Priya around the place – Clinique in the bathroom cabinet, an elegant linen robe on the back of the door – but it didn’t look like she’d moved in just yet. A stack of magazines on the coffee table confirmed that, besides motorcycles, her father had enthusiastically taken to the sort of grunting, alpha exercise that several of the other male junior civil servants in her department also enjoyed.

Restless, Alexa picked up her phone again and started: there was a WhatsApp from Ben. She set her wine glass down carefully, and muted the television. She scrunched her toes – snug in their bed socks – and released them again before she opened the message.

Well that was an absolutely mad morning eh

A nervous bark. She was, at least, not (yet) being ghosted.

Throwing custom and caution to the wind, she started typing back in the box immediately, not drafting and redrafting in her Notes. Her father’s cat, Bumble – a fluffy, spoiled madam with hair that shed everywhere – sashayed into the living room and leaped on to the sofa, stretching out, her claws catching on the sofa’s expensive grey expanse. She typed, nudging the cat gently with her foot.

Yes, certainly not what I expected …

Alexa hit send. He appeared online; the ticks went blue almost instantaneously. He was typing.