His mouth felt oddly dry. He wasn’t sure if it was the joint. ‘Depressed?’ he said.

‘I’m okay now. I mean, my folks were really good. After the last episode they took me to the doctor and got me pills. And they definitely helped. They do apparently lower your inhibitions, but I can’t say that anyone’s complained! HA-HA-HA-HA!’

He handed her the joint.

‘I just feel things very intensely, you know? My psychiatrist says I’m exceptionally sensitive. Some people bounce through life. I’m not one of those people. Sometimes I can read about an animal dying or a child being murdered somewhere in another country, and I will literally cry all day. Literally. I was like it at college too. Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

She rested her hand on his cock. Suddenly Ed felt fairly certain it was not going to spring to life.

She looked up at him. Her hair was half over her face and she blew at it. ‘It’s such a bummer losing your job and your home. You have no idea what it’s like to be really broke.’ She gazed at him as if weighing up how much to tell him. ‘I mean properly broke.’

‘What – what do you mean?’

‘Well … like I owe my ex a load of money but I’ve told him I can’t pay him. I have too much on my credit card right now. And he still keeps ringing me, going on and on about it. It’s very stressful. He doesn’t understand how stressed I get.’

‘How much are you talking about?’

‘Oh. A fair bit.’

‘How much?’ He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

She told him. As his jaw dropped, she said, ‘And don’t offer to lend it to me. I wouldn’t take money from my boyfriend. Makes things too complicated. But it’s a nightmare.’

Ed tried not to think about the significance of her use of the word ‘boyfriend’.

He glanced down at her and saw her lower lip tremble. He swallowed. ‘Um … are you okay?’

Her smile was too swift, too wide. ‘I’m good! Thanks to you, I’m really fine now.’ She ran a finger along his chest. ‘Anyway. It’s been lovely not having to think about it. It’s been heaven going out for nice dinners without wondering how I can afford it.’ She kissed one of his nipples.

That night she slept with one leg slung over him. Ed lay wide awake, wishing he could ring Ronan.

She came back the following Friday, and the Friday after that. She didn’t pick up on his hints about things he had said he had to do at the weekend. Her father had given her the money for them to have a meal. ‘He says it’s such a relief to see me happy again.’

He had a cold, he told her, as she came skipping across the road from the Tube station. Probably best not to kiss him.

‘I don’t mind. What’s yours is mine,’ she said, and attached herself to his face for a full thirty seconds.

They ate at the local pizza place. He had started to feel a vague, reflexive panic at the sight of her. She had ‘feelings’ about things all the time. The sight of a red bus made her happy, the sight of a wilted pot plant in a café window made her vaguely weepy. She was too much of everything. She smiled at too many people. She was sometimes so busy talking that she forgot to eat with her mouth closed. At his apartment she peed with the bathroom door open. It sounded like a visiting horse was relieving itself.

He wasn’t ready for this. She was just too needy. Too erratic. Too everything. Ed wanted to be on his own in the apartment. He wanted the silence, the order of his normal routine. He couldn’t believe he had ever been lonely.

That night he had told her he didn’t want to have sex. ‘I’m really tired.’

‘I’m sure I could wake you up …’ She had begun to burrow her way down the duvet and he actually had to haul her upwards. There followed a tussle that might have been funny in other circumstances: her mouth poised to plug onto his genitals, him desperately hauling her up by the armpits.

‘Really. Deanna. Not … not now.’

‘We can snuggle then. Now I know you don’t just want me for my body!’ She pulled his arm around her and emitted a little whimper of pleasure, like a small animal.

Ed Nicholls lay there, wide-eyed, in the dark. He had forgotten, in the four years that he had been dating and married Lara, how swiftly someone could pivot 180 degrees in your imagination from the most desirable person you had ever seen to someone you would gnaw your own limb off if it meant escaping. He took a breath.

‘So … Deanna … um … next weekend I have to go away for business.’

‘Anywhere nice?’ She ran her finger speculatively along his thigh.

‘Um … Geneva.’

‘Ooh, nice! Shall I stow away in your case?’

‘What?’

‘I could be there waiting for you in your hotel room. When you come back from your meetings, I could soothe your troubled brow.’ She reached out a finger and stroked his forehead. It was all he could do not to flinch.

‘Really? That’s nice. But it’s not that kind of trip.’

‘You’re so lucky. I love travelling. If I wasn’t so broke I’d be back on a plane in an instant.’

‘You would?’

‘It’s my passion. I loved being a free spirit, going where the whim takes me.’ She leant over, extracted a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table and lit it.

‘So you’d like to travel again?’

‘I’d be off like a shot.’

He had lain there for a bit, thinking. ‘Do you own any stocks and shares?’

She rolled off him and lay back against her pillow. ‘A few. I think my grandma left them to me. A hundred shares in some building society and another two hundred in Woolworths. Hah.’ She half laughed. ‘And don’t suggest I bet on the stock market, Ed. I haven’t got enough left to gamble with.’

It was out before he really knew what he was saying. ‘It’s not a gamble.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘We’ve got a thing coming out. In a couple of weeks. It’s going to be a game changer.’

‘A thing?’

‘I can’t really tell you too much. But we’ve been working on it for a while. It’s going to push our stock way up. Our business guys are all over it.’

She was silent beside him.

‘I mean, I know we haven’t talked a lot about work but this is going to make a serious amount of money.’

She didn’t sound convinced. ‘You’re asking me to bet my last few pounds on something I don’t even know the name of?’

‘You don’t need to know the name of it. You just need to buy some shares in my company.’ He shifted onto his side. ‘Look, you raise a few thousand pounds, and I guarantee you’ll have enough to pay off your ex-boyfriend within two weeks. And then you’ll be free! And you can do whatever you want! Go wherever you like!’

There was a long silence.

‘Is this how you make money, Ed Nicholls? You take women to bed and then get them to buy thousands of pounds’ worth of your shares?’

‘No, it’s –’

She turned over and he saw she was joking. She traced the side of his face. ‘You’re so sweet to me. And it’s a lovely thought. But I don’t have thousands of pounds lying around right now.’

The words came out of his mouth even before he knew what he was saying. ‘I’ll lend it to you. If it makes you money, you pay me back. If it doesn’t, then it’s my own fault for giving you dud advice.’

She started laughing and stopped when she realized he wasn’t joking.

‘You’d do that for me?’

Ed shrugged. ‘Honestly? Five grand doesn’t really make a big difference to me right now.’ And I’d pay ten times that if it meant you would leave.

Her eyes widened. ‘Whoa. That is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

‘Oh … I doubt that.’

Before she left the next morning he wrote her a cheque. She had been tying her hair up in a clip, making faces at herself in his hall mirror. She smelt vaguely of apples. ‘Leave it blank,’ she said, when she realized what he was doing. ‘I’ll get my brother to do it for me. He’s good at all this stocks and shares stuff. What am I buying again?’

‘Seriously?’

‘I can’t help it. I can’t think straight when I’m near you.’ She slid her hand down his boxers. ‘I’ll pay you back as soon as possible. I promise.’

‘Here.’ Ed reached over for a business card, and took a step backwards. ‘That’s the name of the company. And do this. I promise it’ll help. Can’t have you feeling hemmed in!’

He smothered the warning voice in his head. His faux cheer bounced off the apartment walls.

Ed answered almost all of her emails afterwards. He was cheerful, non-committal. He said how good it was to have spent time with someone who understood how weird it was just to have got out of a serious relationship, how important it was to spend time by yourself. She didn’t answer that one. Oddly, she said nothing specific about the product launch or that the stock had gone through the roof. She would have made more than £100,000. Perhaps she was busy sticking pins into a picture of him. Perhaps she had lost the cheque. Perhaps she was in Guadeloupe. Every time he thought about what he had done his stomach lurched. He tried not to think about it.

He changed his mobile-phone number, telling himself it was an accident that he forgot to let her know. Eventually her emails tailed off. Two months passed. He took Ronan on a couple of nights out and they moaned about the Suits; Ed listened to Ronan as he weighed up the pros and cons of the not-for-profit soup girl and felt he’d learned a valuable lesson. Or dodged a bullet. He wasn’t sure which.

And then, two weeks after the SFAX launch, he had been lying down in the creatives’ room, idly throwing a foam ball at the ceiling and listening to Ronan discuss how best to solve a glitch in the payment software when Sidney, the finance director, had walked in and he had suddenly understood that there were far worse problems you could create for yourself than overly clingy girlfriends.

‘Ed?’

‘What?’

A short pause.

‘That’s how you answer a phone call? Seriously? At what age exactly are you going to acquire some social skills?’

‘Hi, Gemma.’ Ed sighed, and swung his leg over the bed so that he was seated.

‘You said you were going to call. A week ago. So I thought, you know, that you must be trapped under a large piece of furniture.’

He looked around the bedroom. At the suit jacket that hung over the chair. At the clock, which told him it was a quarter past seven. He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. Well. Things came up.’

‘I called your work. They said you were at home. Are you ill?’

‘No, I’m not ill, just … working on something.’

‘So does that mean you’ll have some time to come and see Dad?’

He closed his eyes. ‘I’m kind of busy right now.’

Her silence was weighty. He pictured his sister at the other end of the line, her jaw set, her eyes raised to Heaven.

‘He’s asking for you. He’s been asking for you for ages.’

‘I will come, Gem. Just … I’m … I’m out of town. I have some stuff to sort out.’

‘We all have stuff to sort out. Just call him, okay? Even if you can’t actually get into one of your eighteen luxury cars to visit. Call him. He’s been moved to Victoria Ward. They’ll pass the phone to him if you call.’

‘Okay.’

He thought she was about to ring off, but she didn’t. He heard a small sigh.

‘I’m pretty tired, Ed. My supervisors are not being very helpful about me taking time off. So I’m having to go up there every weekend. Mum’s just about holding it together. I could really, really do with a bit of back-up here.’

He felt a pang of guilt. His sister was not a complainer. ‘I’ve told you I’ll try and get there.’

‘You said that last week. Look, you could drive there in four hours.’

‘I’m not in London.’

‘Where are you?’

He looked out of the window at the darkening sky. ‘The south coast.’

‘You’re on holiday?’

‘Not holiday. It’s complicated.’

‘It can’t be that complicated. You have zero commitments.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Oh, come on. It’s your company. You get to make the rules, right? Just grant yourself an extra two weeks’ holiday. Be the Kim Jong-un of your company. Dictate!’

Another long silence.

‘You’re being weird,’ she said finally.

Ed took a deep breath before he spoke. ‘I’ll sort something. I promise.’

‘Okay. And ring Mum.’

‘I will.’

There was a click as the line went dead.

Ed stared at the phone for a moment, then dialled his lawyer’s office. The phone went straight through to the answering machine.