Afterwards, Lucas had half danced back through the cobbled streets along which he had trudged a mere four hours before. Dodging carousing students, waving at a few he recognised, he reached his still echoingly empty new flat in what felt like seconds, and bounded up the steps.

Nice to meet you

He texted the moment he was inside, throwing himself lengthways onto his sofa, but then deleted it, only to re-compose it, but not pressing send until he was between his sheets, grey and crumpled, he saw suddenly, and shamefully in need of a change. No immediate answer came, but Lucas told himself not to mind. She liked him. He knew she liked him. Too pumped to sleep, he lay on his back watching the wreaths of cloud drift across a half-moon, on full view thanks to his still curtainless bedroom window. Just the desire – the willingness – to fall in love again felt exhilarating, proof that he wasn’t dead inside after all, that with Esther gone, the weight of failure and blame she had always been so quick to bestow on his shoulders could begin to recede properly at last, making way for a future more rejuvenating than he could ever have dreamed of.

Lucas dropped his forehead onto the window with a sigh, Esther’s castigating tone on the phone still rankling. How naïve to have imagined that the quickest, cleanest divorce money could buy, for all his reluctance and its grimness, would mark an equally clean end. Esther was still there, still with this power to affect his mood.

It would be better when Dylan – always a battleground – was more off their hands, Lucas consoled himself, and when he could finally kick the habit of driving past the house he had been forced to sell, punishing himself with the sight of the Cheshams’ silver Audi parked up by the front door steps. Antonia and Giles. Head teacher and a Maths fellow respectively, with three small, earnest children and family money, to judge from the rapidity of their cash offer. As they had cottoned on to the reasons behind his desire for a quick sale, their smiles had seemed to widen with an insufferable combination of compassion and prurient interest. It wasn’t the future he had planned either, Lucas had wanted to shout at them, and so could they perhaps look to their own laurels instead of speculating about his?

Down in the courtyard the domestic bursar emerged through a side arch, clutching a laptop and talking intently to a tall man in a dark suit whom Lucas didn’t recognise. Lucas kept his forehead pressed to the glass, tracking their progress across the central path of the quadrangle. Were they illicitly entangled? he wondered idly. And if so, then good luck to them.