“Honestly, no. It’s nice to have someone to talk to about it who isn’t my mum.” She made a face. “Well, what did you expect? All men are the same. Yadder yadder. She’s already unbearably smug. And, she’s like, all extra bonded to me now we share some fucked-up divorced-women crap.”

“Whoa, OK, so your mum is still your mum.”

“Even more so. She’s my mum left low on the burner for twelve years to thicken. It’s OK. I’ll sort myself out and move out soon. I need the babysitting too much right now. What with all the trauma of my husband being such a fucking dick, and having to move countries, and no career, or anything. If I wasn’t so desperate to come home, I would’ve determinedly stayed in California and forced him to stay too, so he couldn’t set up home with that posh Chelsea bitch.”

“God, Jessica, it sounds awful. What happened?”

She drunkenly filled me in on it all. Meeting him when she worked at the bar of our local shit hometown hotel, being swept off her feet, dazzled by his adoration and money and expensive dates. How he was the opposite of Ben, really. Constant talk of marriage, and babies, and commitment. He was all in. Of course he was; it was Jessica.

She sighed, and her sadness cut such a stark contrast between the bright joviality of the packed bar around us. “I thought I’d played it right, you know? Finally. After all the shit I’d been through with boys, I’d finally learned the secret.”

I leaned forward. Jessica had never spoken this frankly to me about men before. “What secret?”

Jessica ran a hand through her dark hair and looked me straight in the eye. “There’s no such thing as ‘good men’ and ‘bad men.’ They are the same men,” she said. “They just treat different women differently based on how they view you.”

My nose wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

She stared at me defiantly. “It’s simple. Men see women in two separate categories.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “There are the women they fuck, and the women they fall in love with. And it’s not like the good men are the ones who want to fall in love with women, and the bad men are the ones who just want to fuck them. The men are neutral. They just treat you, a woman, differently, based on whether or not you fall into the ‘fuck’ category, or the ‘love’ category.” She sat back, all voilà! As if she’d delivered an expert TED talk, with the confidence of a Flat Earther.

“I mean,” I said, “I’m not sure if that’s definitive...”

“Of course it is. A hundred percent.”

I started to feel a bit sick. “Do you really think so?”