Chloe’s mother would never have allowed anyone else to do their cleaning, even if they could afford it. ‘So does mine,’ she heard herself say. Why had she said that? Stupid, she scolded herself. If Zadie ever met her mum, she’d know they weren’t the sort of people who had a cleaner. That was an even more stupid thought. Why would Zadie ever meet her mum? She only needed Chloe’s help to fool her parents and then she’d disappear again.

Lissy, the girl down the hall, had explained one evening in the pub about the kind of people who lived off campus. There had been a group of them at the bar, ordering bottles of champagne and laughing. Lissy said that there were a few of them, boys who were only at college here so they could row or play rugby, and their girlfriends. People with money and country houses who went away most weekends and considered the town a little low rent. Lissy had given her a conspiratorial smile, as if to say that she and Chloe were a different, lower sort of person.

‘I’ve got a lecture in a bit,’ Chloe said, taking her books down from her shelf. ‘I should get going.’

‘Is there any chance you might be able to come back later?’ Zadie asked. ‘When my parents are around?’ Her eyes were big and her face pale. How could someone so confident and beautiful be that scared of her parents?

‘Of course,’ said Chloe. ‘I’ll be back by three.’

‘You are the absolute best.’ Zadie threw her arms around Chloe. ‘I mean it. You’re the best room-mate I’ve ever had.’

Chloe returned on the dot of three o’clock, but Zadie’s parents, clearly full of suspicion, had turned up early. They looked exactly as Chloe had imagined. A rail-thin mother with a razor-sharp bob and a fur gilet. A smiling father with a round stomach encased in a navy jumper and with Gucci loafers on his feet.

‘Hey!’ said Zadie, a little too loudly, as Chloe opened the door. ‘I was just going to make some coffee, but I can’t remember where I’ve put the cups.’

Afterwards, Chloe would replay this afternoon in her mind, bathing in the glory of getting it right, for once. ‘Yours are in the dishwasher in the kitchen,’ she said, without missing a beat. ‘We can use my ones – I think you put them in that cabinet?’

‘Zadie,’ said the older woman, pointedly. Chloe tensed, thinking she was about to call their bluff. ‘You haven’t introduced us.’

‘Sorry, sorry. This is Astrid,’ Zadie said, pointing at her mum. ‘And this is Bob.’ Chloe flushed at the idea of calling Zadie’s parents by their first names and resolved not to call them anything at all.