Alexa reread the exchange a couple of times to confirm its existence. Satisfied, she placed the phone back on the mahogany table. As if sensitive that her good name was being taken in vain, Bumble had hopped off the sofa and flounced out of the living room, tail sashaying with each step. She had been sitting on the remote. Alexa picked it up, unmuted the volume and committed to a show about a group of privileged teenagers on New York’s Upper East Side. At university, she and Ellen had watched this show religiously, despite both professing to powerfully hate its unrealistic plot.

Alexa wondered what Ellen and Kayleigh were doing right now. She thought of them together, perhaps tucked up on a sofa, sharing a bottle of wine. The second evening in a row they’d spent together. Alexa picked up her phone yet again and scrolled to their WhatsApp messages. There was nothing since the very early hours of that morning, those WhatsApp messages sent when Ellen was drunk and on her way home from her night out; an entirely different time.

She typed.

Hey, how’s Kayleigh’s?

Dad obviously hasn’t got home yet

Such a teenager

Alexa paused.

Also Ben texted

So that’s fun

She put her phone down and returned to the television.

By the time she got into bed, her father was still not home, so she’d made the bed with crisp clean linens herself. Ellen had read her message but not yet responded, and Alexa felt a little slighted. If anyone should be playing distant it was her! Frowning, Alexa stared at her own message a few times, then turned her phone on to Do Not Disturb and closed the door firmly. She remembered from last time that it had a habit of creaking open in the night. Twigging that she’d been exiled from the room, Bumble started scratching at the door.

She spent the week wishing that she’d packed some better clothes in her grab bag. And so inevitably, on Wednesday lunchtime, flushed and flustered, she legged it to Piccadilly Circus – hopping on the Bakerloo line for two stops – in order to do a swift recce of the shops there. It was drizzling and they were packed with browsers and window shoppers who were taking shelter from the rain; she grabbed a sleek one-shouldered black top from a shelf and, without trying it on, paid the £38 for it. She could wear it with the black trousers she had on already, and she had a pair of white trainers in her bag. The top wasn’t worth the money – nor was she certain she liked it – but it would do, and it was better than her work shirt, which was expensive but, she feared, frumpy.