Finn settles back against the pillows, cautiously hopeful about this wobbly first step towards regaining London’s trust. Then she turns her head and there in the doorway is Ross – chubby, blond, balloon-headed Ross, dressed in a pair of babyish overalls that make him look like a toddler instead of an eight-year-old – staring at her with one finger tunnelling into his nose. He doesn’t say anything, he just watches them. London keeps talking, but Finn can’t concentrate on what she’s saying. She can feel her heart contract in her chest, squeezing out some kind of emotion that she can’t yet identify. All she knows is she is staring at Ross, but she can only see Dallas.

“Get out of here, weirdo!” London yells, chucking a pillow at her brother, which hits him in the knee and drops to the floor. He glances down at it, glances back at Finn, and walks away. London says something else, but Finn can’t hear her over the noise in her head.

Dallas. Her own city-named boy. Dallas the artist, or writer, or filmmaker, depending on the day; Dallas the baristo most days. Dallas the dreamer, the idealist, the early riser, the maker of eggs Benedict with homemade hollandaise, the drawer of maps on ceilings, the poetry whisperer. Dallas the lazy stoner, the jamband apologist, the staunchly bearded. Dallas, the only man Finn had ever slept with, until last night. Finn met Dallas during their first year of university. He was the cool guy, she was the nerd, and when they fell in love it finally seemed like she could have something all her own. Still, in the eight years they were together, he had never actually given her anything other than acute anxiety. “I’ll write a play for you, Finn,” he told her. Then he knocked up her twin sister instead. But whatever. It’s basically the same thing, right?

After Finn found out that Dallas had slept with Nicki, he brought her a coffee. A venti white mocha, no whip. So she lied: he had given her something.

“A coffee?” she asked. “You fuck my sister and then bring me a coffee?” She was standing in the doorway of their apartment, bags packed, ready to move back home – back with the sister he’d fucked, as if everything wasn’t already twisted enough. But she had nowhere else to go.

“It was really confusing,” was all he said. “She just looked so much like you.” Eight long years, disintegrating into the muddy cocktail of Finn and Nicki’s shared genetic code.