Shrugging off her jacket, she pulled out her phone to WhatsApp Ellen. Ellen would – most likely – be out for drinks with her colleagues from The Flowdown. In Alexa’s office, everyone was either very earnest or very pompous, and only interested in talking shop. On the other hand, most of Ellen’s colleagues were young women about her age (twenty-eight), and she was always texting them about things that had absolutely nothing to do with work. Ellen talked about one girl, Kayleigh, a lot, which made Alexa feel uncharacteristically territorial. When Ellen told a story about something Kayleigh had said or done, Alexa’s laughter always sounded – to her own ears, certainly – a little forced. Their office space in Farringdon, which they shared with a bike-repair start-up, Two Wheels Good, sounded fairly riotous, and Friday-evening drinks often ended up in an office party with the bike guys. Ellen had once gone home with a skinny bloke called Lee who ran the Two Wheels Good blog and wrote 800-word tracts about inner tubing. They now had a vaguely flirty but inconsequential relationship that sometimes amounted to a few texts at 3 a.m. on a Saturday (mainly trying to work out if the other one was also ‘out’).

Sometimes, these office parties ended up in a gay bar on Kingsland Road. Alexa had joined these nights a few times. It made her proud to see how much Ellen was liked by her colleagues – indeed, she was something of a ringleader – although Alexa always felt her outsider status keenly, needing all the in-jokes explained to her and panicking if Ellen left her alone with the group. Still, it was always fun, and definitely more fun than tonight’s Plan B – which, as it stood, was to go to the gym.

So Alexa WhatsApped Ellen.

Hey!

What you up to this eve?

Ellen had changed her WhatsApp picture to one of her in a crown, which Alexa recognized from her last birthday party. She smiled, scrolling idly through her WhatsApp inbox while she waited for Ellen to reply, and then noticed – to her surprise – that Ben was typing and stopping and typing and stopping.

This was an unexpected development.