The rain found the sash windows and stayed there, a steady London drum against the glass, the kind of Saturday that never quite dries. Malik and Sophie’s flat was a conversion in Hackney, radiator ticking under the sill, a bottle of red already open on the low table. I am Callum. I am thirty-one. Nia is twenty-eight, Black British, the gold at her throat and the twists rain had tightened at her nape. Malik is thirty, Black British, a body the Hackney lamp sits on without asking. Sophie is twenty-nine. We had said it out loud in a pub on Broadway Market a month before, laughing too much, the four of us, and then we had not said it, and then Nia had put her foot on mine under the table tonight and looked at me as if the looking were the last chance to be cowards. We were not cowards. We were only slow about taking our coats off.

Wine first. That was the agreement. Sophie’s living room, low lamps, a sofa that had seen better decisions, the rug in front of it already slightly wrong from years of feet. Malik talked about work as if work could save us. Nia sat close enough that her thigh was a fact against mine. I could smell her perfume and,…