Plus, she was lucky. Not much else changed, really. Her mother kept the house in Sussex, most of the furniture – and custody of Alexa and her three younger siblings, Nina and the twins, Jacob and Lucy. Her father was, as it had turned out, an average poker player but a very good partner in a law firm, and therefore didn’t struggle much for money. In the holidays, the four of them would shuttle between the country and whichever flat he was living in at the time. There were invariably only two bedrooms in the place, so it would be a squeeze. Jacob and Lucy would get the bed, with Nina on the bedroom floor and Alexa usually on the sofa in the living room. (‘Sorry, kiddo, I keep meaning to upgrade to a pull-out sofa!’ her father would chuckle, every single time Alexa placed her pillow on one end of his regular sofa and prepared to bed down for the evening.) Meanwhile, her mother continued her job as an editor at a publishing house, working three days a week up in town, and the other two at the house, which meant that sometimes she could pick them up from school.

Jacob and Lucy were six years younger than Alexa and currently occupied a shared world of theatre and student parties in Edinburgh, but they WhatsApped often. They were too young to remember the tumult of the divorce in any meaningful detail. For them, life had always involved shuttling between two homes and pretending, diplomatically, to one parent that the other didn’t make their fish fingers the way they liked them.

But Nina – Alexa’s junior by only two years – had been there for all the rows subsequent to the big one. The two of them would sit at the top of the stairs and listen as Elizabeth delivered her acid assessments of Marcus’s failings, and then watch as he shuffled out to the shed again, sending his shadow up the garden path until Elizabeth slammed the back door and the garden was cast into darkness. They’d exchange worried glances and, sometimes, share a bed.

The two remained telepathically close, even though Nina was currently living in Lisbon, working as a copy editor for a start-up. Alexa missed her. They spoke most evenings, and usually for an hour on Sunday. In fact, Ellen reminded her of Nina, which she suspected was what had drawn her to Ellen that first day at York. Both women were clever and loyal and dramatic and extroverted. There was space in her life for the two of them.