“What do you normally have on a Saturday night?” asked Anvita. “Is it two lagers and the bird next door?”

“Well, Mrs. Patel is eighty, and she’s a nice lady, but I don’t think she’s into me that way. Sometimes, I’m out with the lads and I’ll get a pie from the chippy. And sometimes, I’m at home and I’ll make myself . . . ” He paused and thought for a moment. “Actually, I’ll usually make myself a pie.”

Anvita gazed at him, still slightly perplexed. “I don’t know why I’m surprised by this because I see you baking every week.”

“Yeah, it’s not just something I do on telly. It’s how I eat. Like, I sometimes make a little one for tea, or a medium-sized one to last me a couple of days, or a big one if the family’s coming round. It’s pies, mate, not rocket science.”

Their starters finished, the waiter Anvita had scared came back and took away the crockery. Harry had the look of a man resigning himself to having paid way over the odds for a bowl of mushrooms, and Anvita, without the distraction of telling her friends to suck it, was falling back into the doldrums of her poor showing in the blind bake.

“So”—Rosaline attempted to rouse her companions—“what’s everyone got planned for tomorrow?”

Harry shrugged. “Like I said. Big cake with biscuits on it.”

“No, but”—if Anvita hadn’t perked up, she was certainly doing a good impression of it—“you’ve got to have a theme, right?”

“Well. Um.” Harry fidgeted. “It’s sort of a . . . like . . . it’s gonna be a bit blue. And maybe a bit sparkly. Gonna have some fondant on it. Which I might shape and stuff.”

If he’d been trying to discourage Anvita’s interest, he’d picked exactly the opposite of the right strategy. “Why are you being weird about this? Is it a secret? Are you making a secret cake? Is it going to be decorated with the nuclear launch codes?”

“In sparkly blue fondant,” Rosaline added.

“No,” he mumbled, “it’s a bit . . . hard to describe.”

Anvita plonked her elbows on the table and subjected him to an interrogative glare. “You’re embarrassed, aren’t you? You do remember this is going to be on television?”

“Yeah, but I’ll be braced for it then.”

“Blue and sparkly and a bit embarrassing,” repeated Anvita. “We must be able to work it out from that. Is it Magic Mike–themed? Are you going to be baking with your shirt off?”

“What? On the BBC? At eight o’clock on a Tuesday. Not bloody likely.”

“You mean”—Anvita’s eyes were sparkling—“you would bake with your shirt off after the watershed? Are you aiming for a spin-off called Dobson After Dark?”

Harry seemed genuinely appalled. “I know you’ve had a bad day, but you’re going to stop this right now.”

“It’d be brilliant, though. You could be the male Nigella Lawson.”

Without her telling it to, Rosaline’s brain put together a quick mock-up of what a male Nigella Lawson would be like. And to give it credit, it did get to Harry pretty quickly.

“You could be all,” Anvita went on, “What you need to do is knead it firmly, but tenderly, caressing the dough with your thumbs and fingertips.”

“Mate, that’d make rubbish dough.” Harry paused. “Also, if that’s what women find sexy, I’ve been doing it very wrong.”

Rosaline grinned. “If it helps, so have I.”

To Harry’s visible relief, their mains arrived a moment later. True to form, he’d gone for the pie, she’d gone for the cheapest thing on the menu, and Anvita had taken the dish with the coolest name, which in this case had been a pan-fried skate wing.

“I was expecting it to be wingier,” admitted Anvita. “But it just looks like a fish triangle.” She stuck a fork in it. “It’s all right, though. Fishy. How’s the tagliatelle?”

Currently, it was dangling from Rosaline’s mouth in a thoroughly indecorous manner. “Mmmestly mmwishing—” She managed to partially de-pasta herself. “I’m wishing I’d chosen something less messy.”

“Don’t worry about it, mate.” Harry glanced up from his two-bird pie. “I know there’s a bunch of long words in the menu, but at the end of day, it’s just a pub, init? Anyway. It’s your turn. What you doing tomorrow?”

“How can it be my turn?” protested Rosaline, half convinced she had mascarpone on her chin, but not sure how to wipe away something that might only exist in her imagination. “When you totally wouldn’t tell us what you were doing?”

“I did tell you. It’s blue and sparkly and a cake. And it’s got macaroons on it.”

“Is it Elsa from Frozen?” asked Rosaline. “I promise, we’ll let it go if it’s Elsa from Frozen.”

“I did think about doing Elsa, but—oh right. Yeah. I get it. Very funny, mate.”

“Is it,” Anvita suggested, “unicorn poo?”

Harry’s brow crinkled. “Why would unicorn poo be blue?”

“Because they’re magical.”

“And magical things have blue poo?”

“Or”—something bubbled up from the lake of Rosaline’s “was going to be a doctor” factoids—“they’ve all got porphyria.”

“You what?”

“I see that ‘you what’ and raise you an ‘I beg your pardon?’”

“Porphyria,” Rosaline explained. “It’s the thing George III might have had. It turns your poo blue.”

Harry gave a heavy sigh. “Mate, I have to tell my nieces not to talk about poo at the table, but they’re all under ten.”

Something clicked in Rosaline’s brain. “You have nieces. They are under ten. And they’re girls. And you’re not doing Frozen. It’s a mermaid, isn’t it?”

“Bloody hell.” Harry went pink to his ears. “Yeah, all right. I’m doing a mermaid. I thought it’d be nice. I’m doing it diving into the cake so you just see the tail bit. ’Cos that way I don’t have to do boobs on telly.”

Anvita nodded sagely. “Good call. Because otherwise the judges would come round and say, What are you doing, and you’d have to say, I’m moulding a pair of fondant whammers.”