‘Shit a brick.’ Luke slumped back in his chair and looked dazedly down at the table. ‘Why would she do that?’ He addressed the question to his beige wrap, rather than to me – presumably because he felt it would be more likely to provide him with a coherent response.

After a moment or two with no reply from either myself or the wrap, he looked up, reached across the table and patted my arm. ‘Look, it’s not a great thing to have happened, but at least she’s not waiting for you back at the office. You’ll have had a chance to think it all through and calm down before you see her again. Although, to be fair,’ he added, ‘you seem pretty calm right now – in a catatonic kind of way.’

When I still didn’t reply, he said, ‘And now you don’t have a problem with Cameron, which is really, really great. We can all be best buds!’

I stopped rocking, covered my face with my hands and let out a groan.

‘Edie, honestly,’ he said, ‘don’t let this make you feel bad. She was a bitch for doing that to Cameron, but he knows nothing about it, and he doesn’t know that you were angry with him, so just forget about it. Hey and I know it’s not funny right now, but we’ll be wetting ourselves about this tomorrow.’

I slowly lowered my hands from my face and stared miserably up at him.

‘OK,’ he said, hurriedly taking one of my hands and giving it a squeeze, ‘maybe not tomorrow, but in a few weeks’ time you’ll be all, “Remember when I thought you and Cameron were complete sexist bastards?” and we’ll be all, “Yeah, how weird was that?” and we’ll have a right laugh about it.’ He grinned at me and nodded rapidly.

‘Luke, does Cameron work for sex?’ I asked quietly.

At this point, he stopped nodding and his expression bordered on fearful. ‘Does he work for…?’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say, Edie? Only it sounded an awful lot like you were asking me if Cameron is a sex worker. Not that I’d judge if he was, of course. I’m sure he’d be very popular with both sexes.’

‘Does he provide architectural services at reduced cost in exchange for sexual favours?’

His face contorted into an expression midway between laughter and panic.

‘She told you that too?’ he asked, pursing his lips as the corners of his mouth twitched uncontrollably upwards, the urge to laugh clearly winning the day. ‘And you believed her?’

I closed my eyes and decided that this time I might not bother opening them until tomorrow. ‘She said you told her that Cameron was putting work through at reduced cost for a woman he—’

‘Now that bit is true!’ exclaimed Luke excitedly.