Tonight, the journey was neither remarkably quick nor slow, and she felt unmoved, besides a sense of relief, to be close to home as she stepped off the train at New Cross Gate and tapped her card to get through the barriers. She turned left at the station to walk the roughly ten minutes it took to get to 49 Rokeby Close, her handbag – a present from her father when she had got her job – nestled snugly under one arm, a tote bag containing her gym kit bouncing off her hip with every step. She did the route on autopilot, correctly predicting the changes of the traffic lights a beat before everyone else at the crossing. They’d found the house three years ago, after a long summer of ambiguous Gumtree listings and pints in pubs following swift viewings with harried estate agents who all seemed to be called Kenneth. In the end, while they’d all agreed that, yes, it did matter that the third bedroom (Ellen’s) was technically the living room and that, yes, the whole place had smelled a little like fried eggs, 49 Rokeby Close was the best they’d seen.

Their house was positioned a few streets away from a busy main road, on a parallel, far quieter row of Victorian terraced houses. It was a smart street, dotted with big oak trees, and only the occasional dismembered bicycle tangled around a lamp post, rusting and useless. Most of the doors were inscrutable: they were painted blue or dark green, though there was the occasional pink or yellow one singing in the mix. A few houses had proper paths, paved with chequerboard tiling, or tiny, well-tended front gardens with huge earthenware pots sitting either side of thick stone doorsteps. But the best clues to the inhabitants inside were collected by careful peeping: all of the houses on the road had front windows that sat almost at street level, and it was possible to peer inside and determine which were owned by someone comparatively rich, and which were occupied by a group like Alexa, Ellen and Jack.