Chloe arrived home for the Christmas holidays and found herself surprised at how grateful she was to be back. The house was completely unchanged. Still perfect in its boring, semi-detached way. Cleaner than clean, scented with fabric softener and air freshener. For the first two weeks, she revelled in it all, sitting in the back of the Ford Jazz while her mother, who was an uncharacteristically brilliant driver, sat in the passenger seat and Greg drove badly. She folded laundry with her mother, followed her round the supermarket, filling the trolley with uninspiring things. It felt safe and necessary. They ate a slightly dry turkey crown on Christmas Day, exchanged practical, thoughtful gifts. Chloe and her mother shared smiles over Greg’s bald head while he snored in front of the afternoon film on BBC2. It was exactly as it always had been. But as the holiday wore on her mother seemed to grow frustrated with her. The house felt small, even though, as her mother regularly stated, it was the biggest in the cul de sac. Chloe hid in her room, claiming to have lots of work to do, but then procrastinated, reading the books she’d loved as a teenager, poring over her old diaries and staring at her phone, waiting for a message.

Her mother had always told her that waiting for someone to call was the surest way to make sure they didn’t. But in this case, she was wrong. A few days after Christmas Chloe woke, turned on her phone and, just as she had secretly hoped, there was a text from Zadie. ‘What are you doing for new year? MY PARENTS ARE DRIVING ME FUCKING BONKERS xxxxx.’

What was the right reply? If she said she had no plans, she might get an invitation, which was obviously the ideal. But it would be slightly mortifying to admit that all her friends from home had made arrangements with other people. She’d told her mother that she wanted a quiet one after so much partying at uni, but she wasn’t sure that she had believed her.

‘Not sure yet,’ she typed. ‘You? X.’

The reply came almost immediately. ‘My parents always have a big thing at home. Wanna come?’

Chloe wanted to pinch herself – not in a ‘pinch me, I’m dreaming’ way, but to punish herself for how pathetically excited she was. But there was no point trying to suffocate this kind of excitement. A party at Zadie’s parents’ house would inevitably be something out of Evelyn Waugh.

‘I think I might go to a friend’s for New Year’s Eve,’ Chloe ventured to her mother later, twisting a tea towel between her fingers. She and her mother were washing up after supper while Greg watched television, just as they had every evening since he had moved in.

‘Zadie’s?’

‘Yes,’ said Chloe, surprised. ‘How did you know?’