She was getting ahead of herself. She still barely knew Ben, of course. A few dates, one night, some social media sleuthing, which hadn’t revealed much. She knew that he’d studied Social Anthropology at Bristol, worked at a housing charity, lived up the road in Peckham and liked Dulwich Hamlet FC. He had a private and manicured Facebook account that had the hallmarks of a post-university purge (the only reference to university at all, in fact, was that he had graduated from one), and a Twitter account he hadn’t used for almost a year. This was generally used to retweet left-leaning housing think tanks. His last post on Instagram was a group picture from a friend’s wedding last July, captioned: ‘They went to the chapel.’

Ellen had snorted when Alexa admitted that she’d also stalked his profile page on his office website (‘Have you asked for references as well?’).

Ben is the junior communications associate at Make A House A Home. He likes football, cycling and his mum; he dislikes olives, green tea and structural inequality. He lived in Berlin for six months, five years ago. His ultimate ambition is to keep getting this anecdote into almost every conversation he has with anyone.

It was sweet of him to mention his mum, she had thought. The ‘structural inequality’ line was like admitting in a job interview that one of your flaws was ‘being too much of a perfectionist’, but it was a work profile and in a clumsy way, she supposed, he was showing that he had a conscience. Mercifully, they had not discussed structural inequality on any of their dates.

She could hear Jack and Ben now from the window.

‘When I get the choice, I usually pick butternut squash,’ Jack was saying. He must have been talking about his own job.

‘Yeah, it’s good in a curry,’ Ben replied, kindly.

Ellen, on the other hand, had not returned from the corner, and appeared to still be staring at the wall.

Steeling herself, Alexa called out, ‘El? Are you OK?’

There was a pause. The boys both turned to look at her and she shook her head, mystified.

After a second, Ellen replied. ‘I’m fine!’

Her voice was strangled, and contained a discernible note of panic.

Alexa sighed.

She resolved to go over in a second. But first, she permitted herself one last silly daydream: introducing Ben to her parents.