‘Not him …’ she said, lighting up with delight.

The faces on our home page – the people who might love you – changed every month. We already had our woman for next month – a friendly-looking redhead, pretty rather than beautiful, who looked as if she was kind and fun and not one of those lost souls who lug around suitcases full of misery and disappointment. In the redhead’s shy smile, you believed that many good years were still ahead. Now we just needed to find next month’s leading man.

My phone beeped again. Mary frowned with concentration.

‘Not him – gawd! – not him …’

The faces we selected – and Mary and I always did this job together, not least because she enjoyed it so much – were very rarely the most attractive we could find. We chose the sort of faces that made you believe in the possibility of happiness. There was a knack involved, and somehow Mary the tech whiz had mastered it. Which was ironic because Mary was not, as far as I could tell, a big dater.

‘A bit weird … not him … ah, he’s nice … how about this one, Tara?’

And I finally looked at my phone.

Unknown Caller ID, it said.

And then I was staring at my phone in disbelief. Because the locked-screen preview displayed three photographs of me in a stranger’s bed.

In all of them I was sleeping. In the first two images, clearly taken just moments apart, I was on my side, my face half-buried in the pillow, the hotel room of the Park Hyatt Tokyo in darkness. In the third image, which must have been taken hours later, there was the honey-coloured light of a Japanese dawn pouring into the room. Morning had broken in Tokyo and I was moments from waking up in James Caine’s bed and being fucked for the third time. My stomach lurched and I tasted something bitter in my mouth.

There was a single word under the three images.

Kawaii.

Cute. Kawaii, I knew, is the Japanese word for cute.

Then I was standing up, the phone gripped in my hand, the sickness rising.

‘Tara?’

I stared at Mary.

‘How about him?’ she said.

I looked at the face on the screen. A man in his early thirties, grinning with what looked like two decades of self-satisfaction. I numbly shook my head.

‘Oh, I get it,’ Mary smiled, leaning closer to the screen. The man looked like he had already had considerable success on dating apps. And off dating apps, come to that. ‘He’s too much the male model, right?’ Mary said. ‘Women don’t want a man who looks like he cares more about his skin regime than they do!’

I turned my back to her, shielding my phone, afraid she might have already seen.

And I stared again at the photographs with dread and disbelief.

‘Not your type,’ Mary said.

‘I didn’t know I had a type,’ I said sharply, turning to look at her.