Max was proving difficult to buy a birthday present for, and Chloe wasn’t the only one who thought so. It was Sunday morning, a week before the party. Zadie and Chloe were lying on the sofa, searching for inspiration.

‘What about a rugby ball?’

‘I think that’s the worst suggestion so far.’

‘Okay, but what if it was an old rugby ball. A vintage one.’

‘Would that make it any better?’

Zadie sat up. ‘This is impossible. I’m just going to give him a blow job and have done with it.’

‘At least you’ve got that option.’ Chloe had meant the words to sound like a joke, but they had sounded almost envious. Zadie looked bemused.

‘I think we need more inspiration. Let’s go and look at the stuff he’s got, see if it makes us think of anything.’

They ran up the stairs to the second bedroom, which Max kept his stuff in because Zadie’s astonishing wardrobe filled the master bedroom. Max was almost frighteningly tidy. His shirts were hung up with military precision, his physio equipment all laid out, weights stacked. Chloe had never spent any time in here, for obvious reasons. ‘My God, he’s tidy,’ she said, admiring the pile of clearly unopened textbooks on his desk.

‘I know. That’s boarding school for you.’

‘You went to boarding school.’

Zadie opened Max’s wardrobe, flicking through it absent-mindedly. ‘I went to a special kind of boarding school where they encourage you to find your inner self and you can wear whatever you want. Max went to one where they make you run around the rugby pitch in your shorts even when it’s minus one, and all the teachers talk about how much they miss caning. He hated it.’

‘Why didn’t he leave?’

‘His parents thought it was the way to give him a “better” life, or some nonsense like that. They grew up with nothing, wanted better for Max, all that stuff people do when they’re trying to convince themselves it’s okay for their kid to be miserable.’

‘It was that bad?’

‘Absolutely. We were only allowed to talk on the phone once a week. He’d be standing in some freezing-cold corridor, trying not to cry because he was so unhappy. I hated him knowing that I was having such a lovely time. Sometimes I used to lie in my letters.’

Chloe realized that she’d never asked Zadie, in all their talks, how she and Max had met.

‘It’s nothing very exciting,’ Zadie told her now. ‘My school was a few miles from his and they used to bring us in to do plays. I was drafted in to be Cordelia in King Lear.’ Chloe listened to the story as she opened the drawers of Max’s desk.

‘Was Max in it, too?’