‘Hi,’ she said, her voice a little gravelly.

‘What was that?’ His own voice was thick with sleep and partly metabolized wine. ‘Man, I feel a bit rough,’ he added, with a cough of laughter.

‘Oh, must be one of my housemates – at the door.’

Another insistent knock.

‘Lex?’

It was Ellen. Alexa was very relieved it wasn’t Jack.

Alexa hadn’t missed Ellen’s smirk when she finally opened the door – not that it had lasted very long, of course. Not once she’d got on to the mini waterfall, and the busted tap downstairs.

So instead of morning sex, maybe, and then brunch, possibly, and chatting in Ellen’s room, definitely, Alexa was now, quite possibly, living with the man for the rest of her life. Cloistered in an attic full of Top Gear magazines and ventilated by a single window.

4. Jack

Jack didn’t know much about Alexa’s date – the man who’d locked them in the attic – but he wasn’t totally certain about him yet. For a start, he was even worse at Risk than Ellen, who had looked murderous when Jack suggested playing. Ben kept picking up members of his own infantry to fiddle with, and no one could keep track of how he was doing.

Jack hadn’t known she was seeing someone; he and Alexa did not have those kinds of conversations, about love lives or dates or boyfriends or girlfriends. It probably would have made Jack feel awkward. Mainly, they talked about the Tesco shop or whether he’d washed up. Still, he liked Alexa. She was smart and neat and always sounded very interested in everything he had to say, even if it was just about the Tesco shop.

He liked Ellen too, even though she was impatient with him, and always went into the bathroom just as he was about to go in. And 49 Rokeby Close was – by far – the best house he’d visited on his SpareRoom hunt. Before, he’d slept on his big sister Maisie’s couch in Earlsfield, which was fine, except Trixie the cat kept waking him up by jumping on to his stomach, and Maisie’s husband, Rich, kept asking, pointedly, when he was planning on finding ‘his own place’.