I walked around my flat and searched for evidence that he’d been there. I held the copy of the book he’d left on the bedside table the last time he stayed. I touched the set of drawers he had helped me put up in the bedroom. His red woollen hat was in the cupboard. I turned it inside out and put my face into it – my knees reacted to the instantly recognizable scent of him. I hated him for making me a woman who breathed in an absent man’s knitwear like it was a reviving salt. But every day since he’d disappeared, I’d needed proof he had existed. Yes, he had been here. His trace was here. I hadn’t dreamt him at all.

But finding proof of his existence meant I had to ask myself a harder question: if he was real, but he was gone, had I dreamt our relationship? Had I invented what we were to each other? The magic that I had felt when he’d picked me up and kissed me on the dance floor the first night we met, ‘The Edge of Heaven’ our soundtrack, was that one-sided? Did Max make everyone feel like that? Was he an illusionist? Was this a show-stopping, spangled deception he could perform on anyone? The love I’d felt, the details of him I’d studied like an academic, the future I’d tentatively begun to think about – were they sleight of hand and tricks of the mind? Had I fallen for it?

I wondered how long I’d be waiting for an answer. I thought about Grandma Nelly and how she waited for her husband who never returned. I tried to recall being in her house when I was little and what she’d look like in the morning when the post came. Had she really stood at the door and waited every day for his handwriting on the front of a letter?

There was so much I thought I’d known about Max, but now I questioned whether we had been perfect strangers in a pretence of togetherness. We had first met as five photos and a few words about our respective hobbies, jobs and location. Our meet-cute of Linx profiles was anything but spontaneous – it was curated and censored, enabled by an algorithm, determined by self-selection. We’d read the signage of each other and we’d filled in the rest with our imaginations. Had I created kismet from coincidental – from the fact that we’d both grown up to the sound of a Beach Boys album which was probably the favourite album of every baby boomer alive? Had I applied more soul to him than he possessed, because of the vintage concert posters on his wall? Had I trusted him too quickly and fallen too deeply, because I’d projected my own version of his personality into the holes of my knowledge of him?

As I stood in the chasm between who I thought he was to me and the reality of a person who never wanted to speak to me again, I realized just how much we hadn’t known about each other. I didn’t know what his handwriting looked like if he sent me a letter, he wouldn’t recognize mine. He didn’t know the name of my grandparents, I didn’t know the name of his. We’d barely seen each other around other people, apart from waiting staff and strangers in queues. I’d never met any of his friends – I hardly heard about any of his friends, which, for some reason, had never seemed strange. On our first date, he’d told me how untethered he was and I hadn’t taken that as a warning. Nor did I question why he spent most weekends by himself in the countryside. I didn’t know why his dad moved so far away when he was so young. I didn’t know if his mum was waiting for a letter too. He didn’t know my dad before my dad started leaving the house at six a.m. to go look through the kitchen cupboards of a stranger’s house he thought was his. And now he never would.

I deleted Max’s number along with all our messages and I knew then that I would never see or hear from him again. I accepted it. It was over. He was gone.

Part Two

* * *

‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind’

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

11

The last months of winter marked the beginning of the most tyrannical of pre-spring rites: hen dos.

I didn’t want to go to Lucy’s hen do. I barely wanted to go to my actual friends’ hen dos. At thirty-two, I had been to plenty – I’d sat through enough Mr and Mrs videos to know that every man’s favourite sex position with his future wife is either doggy style or girl on top. I’d sipped through enough penis straws and blown up enough flamingo balloons to create 150 tonnes of plastic for landfill. I’d declined every invitation to hen dos from the age of thirty onwards. But Joe had pleaded with me to go – he said that it would make Lucy feel more ‘comfortable’ about me being part of the ‘wedding party’ if she felt I was there for both of them rather than just for him. Katherine dropped out at the last minute, as she was feeling a bit too pregnant to spend the weekend whooping on command. Thankfully, Lucy invited Lola in her place – she was often the first reserve for hen dos of women she’d only count as an acquaintance. She was also regularly invited to the evening-only, post-dinner portion of a wedding reception of couples she didn’t know that well. I think the reasons for this were threefold: she was fun, she always bought a present from the gift registry and she was always single. And single women at a thirty-something party carried the same calibre of entertainment as a covers band. We weren’t pregnant so we’d always drink, we had no one to go home to so we’d always stay out late and we might get off with someone which gave the evening some narrative tension for everyone else. And best of all: we were free!

Lola was applying make-up at a café in Waterloo, next to her monogrammed wheelie suitcase. She was wearing a floor-length Navajo cardigan, a denim rompersuit and a pair of white cowboy boots. Plaits as thin as embroidery silk threads ran through her masses of blonde hair and half-a-dozen pearly clips kept it pulled back off her face. Lola still wanted to look like the girl her fifteen-year-old self had wanted to look like.

‘I’m going mad, Nina,’ she said as I approached her and she pulled me in for a hug with the hand not holding a mascara tube. ‘Absolutely fucking mad.’

‘Why?’

‘Andreas. The architect from Linx.’

‘Let’s get to the platform and you can tell me what happened.’

‘I need to finish my make-up.’

‘Do it on the train,’ I said impatiently. Lola was infuriatingly laissez-faire about transport.

‘Let me just finish my eyes,’ she said, aggressively thrashing the mascara wand through her eyelashes over and over again.

‘No one remotely fuckable is going to be on a train to Godalming, trust me,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ Lola said, doing one last thrash on each eyelash before putting away her make-up bag and standing up with her suitcase. ‘So, we’ve been on about five dates now. Things are going really well. But I know he’s sleeping with loads of other women and, while that hasn’t bothered me before, it’s starting to make me feel insanely jealous.’

‘Okay, firstly – how do you know he’s sleeping with lots of other people?’

She retrieved her phone from her handbag as she walked, opened WhatsApp and presented me with the screen.

‘See? Online. He’s always online.’

‘So? He could be talking to a friend?’

‘Men don’t talk to friends, that’s not how men work, they’re not like us. And if they do, they message things like: See you there at four, mate. They’re not glued to their phone for hours and hours of the day.’

‘I don’t know if that’s true. Joe was on loads of WhatsApp groups that just traded rubbish gifs and memes all day.’

‘What kind of groups?’ she asked immediately, her eyes twitching from what looked like little to no sleep.

‘Oh, you know, like footie practice. Or Ibiza 2012, which just rumbled on and on.’

‘But he’s on it all night every night. It’s the night shift that really worries me. Men aren’t online until two a.m. talking to anyone else other than a girl they’re trying to have sex with.’

‘How do you know he’s online until two a.m. every night?’

‘Because I basically just sit there with our chat window open on my phone not talking to him but watching him be online. I cancelled dinner with a friend last night to do it.’

‘Lola.’

‘I know. Pretended I had a cold. Had to post an Instagram story of me fake-drinking Lemsip to support my alibi.’

We put our tickets through the barrier machines and walked along the train platform.

‘Why don’t you ask him about it?’

‘What would I say?’

‘Say that you’ve noticed he’s online a lot on WhatsApp, make a joke about it.’

‘No, he’ll know what that means. I don’t want him to think I’m trying to control his sex life or be possessive.’

We boarded the train and sat on the nearest free seats next to each other.

‘Okay, then you have to stop thinking about it for now and then have the exclusivity chat when you feel that it’s appropriate to have it.’

‘Yeah,’ she sighed, looking out of the stationary train’s window. ‘When will this all end? I just want someone nice to go to the cinema with.’

‘I know,’ I said.

A man ran along the platform for the train with a baby strapped to his chest. He held its head protectively. The train guard blew a whistle to signify its imminent departure and the man put his foot into our carriage’s door.