Perhaps this will be the making of us? she wondered, smiling a little at the thought. She indulged the daydream of herself and Ben as a real couple, no more toing and froing on Hinge, fretting about WhatsApp messages sent or not sent. Alexa had had two serious boyfriends before, though she wasn’t sure whether Kai, her secondary-school boyfriend, even properly counted. She’d known him since primary school – he lived in the same village as her, and they’d attended the big school in town together too, getting the same bus to and from school every day. This was about all they’d had in common. After getting together at a sixth-form party, they’d dated for eight months, in which their most meaningful conversations had been about their A Level timetables. She had quietly dumped him in her first week at York, and he still avoided eye contact with her in the pub every Christmas. Their mothers were still in the same book club, so the break-up didn’t seem to have come between them.

Then there was Euan, whom she’d started dating in her last year of university, in a relationship that lasted two and a bit years altogether. He’d been the top economist in their year, had gone to one of those schools whose names people knew and whose alumni still talked about them a decade later, and he had a chorus of female friends whom he’d met as a teenager, all of whom were cloyingly nice to Alexa. Until he’d decided the best move for his career (as a management consultant) was to move to Singapore. They had tried a long-distance relationship for a couple of months, but the distance had been too great, and the time difference too topsy-turvy. After the second month, they both stopped talking about Alexa visiting. And then, after three, they both agreed – sadly – that they couldn’t carry on this way indefinitely. She’d cried most nights for a month, moped for another and then got over it. That had been about four years ago. Every so often he popped up on her Facebook. He had a new girlfriend, Venetia, who worked for a bank out there and was beautiful in an unexciting sort of way (hair, nails, expensive jeans). On social media, they would regularly ‘check-in’ on extravagant mini-breaks. ‘You can never have too much of Paris – unless you are a credit card’ read one recent post, showing the two of them grinning near the Musée d’Orsay. Six months ago, he’d added her on LinkedIn. In his profile picture he looked handsome in a slick, groomed sort of way, his wide smile slightly vacant. Still, she’d accepted the request.

Undeniably, Ben would be an upgrade. Euan was impressive in many ways but Alexa found herself agreeing with Ellen’s verdict that he was ‘pretty bland’ (she had politely waited a full week after the break-up before offering this assessment.)