They settled back into a not particularly companionable silence, during which Ellen observed, dully, that in all the time she’d known Alexa, which was about a decade now, and in all the houses they’d shared together (two in York and three in London), Alexa had only brought a few boys home. She wished she could say something to this effect, although she knew Alexa would throttle her. She tried to catch Alexa’s eye in order to give her a meaningful look of her own, but Alexa was now totally fixated on Ben.

Ellen frowned.

Ellen and Alexa had their meet-cute in a seminar on Dream Visions in Medieval Literature during their first week of university. Some stragglers had slunk into the seminar and their tutor – a tall and elegant bespectacled woman in her forties – had accidentally told them to ‘shit down’. Ellen had spun round immediately, searching for kinship with one of these strangers. Across the room Alexa’s blue eyes had widened, and she bit her lip. Ellen had raised an eyebrow and dared a smile back. After class, Ellen had hung back in order to time her exit with Alexa’s. They’d said a shy ‘hello’ and Alexa had asked Ellen whether she was walking to the library, which she wasn’t but pretended she was so that she could spend a little more time in Alexa’s orbit. And they’d ended up having tea together in the library cafe, in which they’d mainly talked about their course and which halls they were in, but it was a start. At the end, they’d swapped numbers and Ellen had texted Alexa before the next seminar, asking if she fancied walking there together from town, and they were off.

For the first few months of their acquaintance, Ellen had tiptoed a little around her new friend – an unknown quantity, with her satchel and her frowny resting face. Alexa was unafraid and funny and had a sense of mischief – these were all the things Ellen liked about her straight away – but she was also quite serious and inscrutable. Sometimes, just before they met for a coffee or a walk, Ellen would feel nervous. She’d have date-oriented anxieties, worried their chemistry would be off, that they’d have nothing to talk about, or that she’d say something odd.