Aislinn knew how to pick them. Her exes make Rory look like an entire theme park’s worth of thrills and spills. The first guy is an accountant for a software company that had a rough ride through the recession, going by the worn-out carpet and the water stains on the ceiling, but the buzz in the office says things are picking up. He met Aislinn in a sandwich queue when they were nineteen and went out with her for six months, but they both made it clear from the start that they weren’t looking for anything serious; when they got bored they drifted off in their separate directions, no hard feelings and no let’s-stay-friends. He remembers Lucy, vaguely, but they never had any problems and he can’t think of any reason why she would have a grudge against him. He’s nice-looking, in a forgettable way, and he seems like a nice guy; he says Aislinn was a nice girl, they had a nice time together, now he has a nice fiancée who he took for a nice dinner on Saturday night and he’s never even looked Aislinn up on Facebook.

The second ex is maybe half a notch less boring. He works in a call centre, in a massive corporate office building plonked down in a field in the middle of nowhere; someone’s genius business-park idea that got smashed in the crash, or someone’s carefully planned tax loss. Four of the five floors are empty; the fifth has a few dozen drones in one corner, talking too loud because there’s no one to be disturbed. For our chat, the guy brings me to some executive corner office, bare, with a film of dust covering the bed-sized desk. He met Aislinn through Lucy, five years back, when he was still trying to make it as a lighting operator. They had been going out for eight months, and he was starting to think this could be something special, when she dumped him. She said, and he believed her, that it was because she felt the same way: this was getting real, and what with looking after her sick mother, Aislinn didn’t have the spare time or energy for something real. No contact since, not till he saw her on the news two nights back. He drifted out of touch with Lucy, too, when he quit theatre; not on bad terms, they just weren’t particularly close to start with and didn’t bother hanging out any more. On Saturday evening he was at a gig – we’ll check the alibis, but I’m not expecting any surprises. The shock and the sadness and the tinge of wistful might-have-been ring true, but so does the distance: Aislinn was in this guy’s past. He wasn’t chasing her, looking to relight the fire, getting pissed off when he saw her preparing for a date that didn’t include him.