Ellen felt spiteful. ‘I’m Ellen, by the way,’ she added, as a peace offering. She stretched out a hand, but then – thinking better of it – turned it into a wonky wave.

‘Ben.’

Wait – the penny plummeted very suddenly, hurtling through the whorls of her wine-fogged brain – was this Hinge Ben? She smiled neutrally in a way that she hoped disguised that his name meant anything to her.

Alexa had started speaking to Hinge Ben about six weeks ago. After they matched, he had opened their chat by telling her that he used to work at the pizza restaurant where the second picture on her profile was taken – and he didn’t want to disappoint her, but all the dough was microwaved from frozen. Alexa had run with it. In the course of their quite extensive messaging, he had proved himself to have an uncommonly good grasp of grammar, not to mention the fact that he had not once used the crying laughing emoji, a quality that made him as rare as a unicorn on the capital’s dispiriting millennial dating-app scene.

He was talking again. ‘So how do you guys all know each other?’

‘Well, we went to university together,’ Ellen replied, pointing at Alexa. ‘In York. And now we live together. In this attic.’

Gratifyingly, Ben laughed.

Ellen smiled back.

‘I wish there was some food up here,’ Jack said mournfully, by way of an interruption. ‘Hi, by the way,’ he said, shyly. ‘I’m Jack.’

Ben nodded back warmly. ‘Ben.’

Jack offered a half-wave.

‘Were you at uni with them too, then?’

‘No –’ Jack started to explain.

‘We got Jack on SpareRoom,’ Ellen interrupted, immediately regretting how it had sounded.

Jack had joined the house last September, when their friend Sophie had moved out to live with her girlfriend. He had been, by far, the best of an eccentric bunch of applicants. Their least-favourite had been a thirty-five-year-old actuary who – when asked if he had any questions – had responded, ‘What is the policy on group sex?’

‘There isn’t one,’ Alexa had said, firmly.

He’d tried to add them both on Facebook later that evening.

They were both fond of Jack, although sometimes, on evenings when Ellen was alone and heard the front door slam, followed by his hopeful ‘Halloo’, her heart would sink that she couldn’t have a little more time to herself. She’d pause before calling out a subdued ‘Hi, Jack’ in return. Still, he seemed unfazed by the silences that sometimes fell in the evenings, happy to fill them with humming, or a muttered commentary on the meal he was pulling together. (‘Soup? Soup. Bread. And the butter.’)

‘Yes, they picked me from all the others on the app,’ Jack said, quickly. ‘I was living with my sister Maisie before, in her house in Earlsfield – after I moved down from Manchester. That’s where I’m from.’

‘Gotcha,’ Ben replied.