‘Can we step outside?’ Lucy said, lifting her glass towards the balcony behind the sliding glass door. Quinn pulled the door open and a sharp blast of cold air hit them both. He took off his jacket to wrap around Lucy’s shoulders.

‘Listen, I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it tonight, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what Carol said,’ Lucy said, hugging his jacket.

Carol was the relationship counsellor Lucy and Quinn had been seeing for the last month. Lucy’s idea. She decided Quinn had a ‘fear of intimacy, stopping him from taking their relationship to the next level’. She thought he needed therapy to ‘unpack unresolved issues about his childhood’. This was the problem with the internet; everyone fancied themselves amateur psychologists.

He and Lucy had been together for a year and three months. Lucy expected ‘I love you’ by six months, preferably three. Fifteen months meant there had to be something wrong with him. She had said it at six, to the day. He didn’t know many women who would drag someone to couples therapy just to get him to say those words, but she clearly thought he was worth trying to fix. Lucy was solutions-based; it was one of the things he liked about her.

The therapy with Carol was a warning siren pulsing through his temple, yet for some reason he had muted the sound for over a month. Why hadn’t he just ended it? He would never have tolerated such scrutiny or interrogation from past girlfriends. One answer could be that he did in fact love Lucy; perhaps he didn’t want to leave? She was beautiful, bright and confident – what was not to love? She had even been accommodating about his aversion to phone calls, something other women had never been able to tolerate. She didn’t need him, she wanted him – it was a dynamic that worked.

And yet, in the dimly lit periphery of his subconscious, Quinn was aware of a darkness lurking. If he ever shone his attention towards it, it would skulk back into the shadows, ungraspable. And yet. Only yesterday he had stared down that shadow for the first time. He had seen it for what it was and he had formulated it into words. Ever since Polly, he had been subconsciously attracted to women with unappealing qualities. It didn’t make sense, he didn’t understand it, but once he’d thought it, he couldn’t help looking back at his relationship history through this strange, murky lens. Jaya had been a narcissist, Eddie a compulsive liar, Anna hated dogs and Lucy was a snob who was rude to waiting staff. All these traits had been immediately visible to him and yet, strangely, were part of the attraction.