‘I feel like I really should plan to be single forever. Have a baby solo. I keep threatening to go for it. Maybe I should take the hint the universe or whatever is throwing at me. I just want to live my life, man. It feels pathetic to be somehow waiting.’ She sighed dramatically. Stuart didn’t need to know that before her cancer treatment she’d both harvested eggs and had them fertilized with donor sperm. Making embryos as a single woman with cancer had been a complicated decision, and one even some of her family hadn’t understood. She’d have to use a surrogate when she wanted kids, but that wasn’t the point right now. The point was, she really did think she might have to proceed without a partner by her side. So why shouldn’t she do that sooner rather than later? Evidently that partner wasn’t anywhere close to making himself known.

‘I could introduce you to some friends, you know,’ Stuart said, wiping down stray specks from around his display. Stuart was a twenty-five-year-old art school graduate who treated coffee like as much of a craft as his own pottery. Slim build and black skin, he wore straight-leg jeans rolled twice, socks on show, and bulky sneakers that seemingly never got grubby – as well as a t-shirt with two rolls of the sleeve and a single pierced ear. ‘If you wanted somebody pre-vetted for ghosting, or lying, or general romantic ambivalence.’

Penny stood and walked behind the counter to make another coffee, her third of the morning. ‘Aw, thanks. But I don’t think you should be setting your boss up.’

Stuart stepped out of her way. ‘You have too many rules.’

‘If I dated one of your friends – who, you know, let’s be fair, would be too young for me anyway – in three dates’ time I wouldn’t want to be running into him because he’s here to meet you after your shift, but had told me he had to move to Kazakhstan for a work assignment and that’s why he couldn’t be with me. When I get ghosted, I really do expect to never see them again. It’d be added mortification otherwise, and I haven’t got the stomach for it.’

‘Just promise me you won’t give up,’ Stuart soothed. ‘Dating is hard for everyone until it’s not. You only have to get it right once, that’s what my pa says. Your soulmate could be just around the corner. He could appear at any minute, and it’d be a shame to miss him because your head is too far up your own self-pitying—’