It was true. Rav was one of the worst cooks Chloe had ever encountered. His family had a maid when he was a child and he was at boarding school throughout his teens, so at no point had he learned to do anything other than wrap a chicken breast covered in packet spice mix in tin foil and bake it in the oven. He called it chicken à la Rav. Once, when they’d gone to Zurich to stay with his family, Chloe had made a joke about Rav’s cooking, or rather the lack of it. ‘I suppose we didn’t equip Ravinder with cooking skills. An oversight,’ his mother had said. Chloe had burned with shame for hours.

‘Excuse me,’ said Max, getting up from the table and laying his napkin over the dining chair. ‘The glasses are getting worryingly empty.’ Chloe watched him as he went to the far side of the kitchen.

‘I’ll go and get some more water,’ she said, picking up the jug.

‘I can do that,’ offered Verity.

‘No, no. You’ve been running around all evening. I’ll do it.’ This was Chloe’s chance to speak to Max alone and to find out how the hell he got that ring.

9

Then

A week after Max and Zadie’s party, Chloe was sitting at her desk in her room, rereading the same passage of Love’s Labour’s Lost for the third time. Zadie hadn’t been back since the day her parents had visited. All that remained of her was a trail of detritus from the bottom of her handbag – tobacco strands, glitter and dust – still strewn over the otherwise empty bedside table. Chloe couldn’t quite bring herself to clean it up. She stretched in her seat, wondering what time it was. It had to be at least ten. Maybe eleven. The spiteful clock on her bedside table claimed that it wasn’t even quite nine. Still at least another hour until she could reasonably go to bed, and nothing to distract her but her own cramped blue handwriting in the margins of her least favourite Shakespeare play. She could go downstairs to the bar; she knew that. Staying here was cutting off her nose to spite her face, as her mother would have so enjoyed saying. But after what had happened at Max and Zadie’s house she had entered a sort of self-imposed isolation. She’d turned her phone off, not checked her college email address and pretended not to be in when Lissy and the other girls from her corridor banged on the door and tried to tempt her to pizza and rom-coms in the common room.