And that would have been great in principle. But Rosaline knew how this went. One minute, you were having a nice, normal, maybe slightly flirty conversation, and the next you were having to explain how you’d gone from medicine at Cambridge to a temp job and the school run, and from there it was either “Poor you, what a disaster” or “Gosh, I didn’t think you were the type.” And you knew that the person you were talking to had stopped thinking Hey, she seems all right; maybe I should ask her out and started thinking Hey, she seems like she’s got a lot of baggage; I hope she doesn’t ask me to babysit.

“But,” she tried, “won’t the space-time continuum collapse if two British people talk about something that isn’t the weather or the buses?”

“You know, Rosaline-um-Palmer”—she somehow knew he was smiling—“I’m willing to risk it.”

Fuck. Oh fuck. Okay, Rosaline, take control of the situation. “So what do you do then?”

There was another long silence.

Once it had progressed from a long silence to a long, long silence, Rosaline—convinced she’d somehow messed up—broke it in a panic: “Um, are you okay?”

“Oh yes, fine. Just waiting to see if the universe falls down around us. But I think we’re safe. I’m a landscape architect.”

She had no idea what that was, or rather how it differed from a regular architect, but it sounded like it would be arty enough to be satisfying but lucrative enough that your, say, parents couldn’t object. “Is that an architect lying on his side?”

“Is it what? No, it’s like the—Oh.” He broke off and gave a deep chuckle. “Well, as it happens I am lying on my side, so I suppose at the moment I’m both. But more generally, it’s landscape as opposed to residential or commercial, rather than landscape as opposed to portrait.”

“How do you architect a landscape?” she asked. “It’s not like you can be all, Hey, put another mountain over there or Can we take the sky down a couple of inches?”

“You might be surprised. I had a lake moved once.”

“How?”

“No idea. That’s for the hydrological engineers to sort out. I just pointed at it, and said, ‘I think this is blocking access to the deer park.’”

“I can’t tell if that makes you cool and powerful or . . . a bit of a middle manager?”

“Honestly,” he told her with a ruefulness she found endearing, “neither can I.”

Rosaline rolled back towards the edge of the bed and looked down. She could make out the shape of him—leaning on one side like a statue of a reclining emperor and looking up at her, his face a mystery of shadows in the starlight. “But do you enjoy it?”

“I do.” She couldn’t make out his eyes, but there was an intensity in his voice that reminded her of the late-night conversations she’d had at university. “It’s like baking in a way. You have to balance the technical with the creative. I mean, there’s no point putting a path in a park that isn’t wide enough for two people to walk their dogs past each other.”

“Well, you could be setting up meet-cutes?”

“I’m sorry. You’ve lost me.”

“Okay, stop me if this getting too technical for you, but it’s when two people meet in a cute way.”

“Does that happen a lot?” he asked. “You’re making me feel like I’m meeting people wrong.”

“Clearly you are.” She grinned to herself in the darkness.

“Because when you’re out walking your dog, what happens all the time is that someone will be coming the other way—down the path in the park that’s too narrow—and your leads will get tangled up and then, depending on what movie you’re in, either you’ll say, ‘Oh gosh, I’m terribly sorry,’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh no, not at all,’ but everyone will know you secretly want to bang. Or else you’ll say, ‘Hey, watch it, lady’ and she’ll say, ‘Move it, mister,’ and everyone will know you secretly want to bang.”

He laughed again, and Rosaline permitted herself a small bask in a glowy feeling. You didn’t make somebody laugh this much unless you were acing it in the wit department, they liked you a lot, or some combination of the two. “What if I don’t have a dog?”

“Then you’re in the wrong kind of movie.”

“Or,” he suggested, “designing the wrong kind of park.”

“Yes, you should think about that next time.”

“Oh should I?” he asked. “Anything else I should bear in mind?”

“Lots of things. Revolving doors to get your coat caught in. Those fountains that are completely flat to the ground and just spurt up out of the concrete unexpectedly. And if you could design all your staircases to be really hard to go down in heels without either breaking one or falling over, that’d be perfect.”

“Are you suggesting”—it was the sort of half-playful, half-dry tone that needed an eyebrow raise—“I deliberately design spaces to be more difficult for women to navigate?”

“Well, how else are we supposed to meet people?”

“I don’t know. I suppose you could always wait until you get stranded at a disused train station. That or Tinder.”

“I think I’ll take the train station. Nobody’s pretending to be ten years younger than they are, and you get fewer creepy messages. But,” she went on quickly, partly from genuine interest and partly to delay the inevitable questions about herself, “what brought you from architecture to Bake Expectations?”

She heard him flump onto his back and then utter a soft, slightly self-mocking groan. “You’ll think I’m such a cliché.”

“Yes, because I know so many landscape architects who also make cakes on TV.”

“Honestly, it’s appallingly first world problems of me. I just—” He broke off and then tried again. “I find my job very fulfilling, and—I’m afraid I don’t know how to say this without sounding boastful—I’ve achieved quite a lot of what I expected to achieve in my life. But sometimes I find myself wondering if there isn’t something...something else. Something I’m missing out on.”

This was all very familiar to Rosaline, albeit for very different reasons. “I don’t think that’s a cliché. I think that’s normal. I mean, I hope it’s normal because I feel like that all the time.”