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“Are you all right?” Emmy asks, hanging up her coat. Today she’s in a mustard tea dress and chunky black boots with soles like tractor tyres. “You look wrecked.”

“I met the neighbour.”

“You never.” She sets her cup down and sweeps her long dark hair over one shoulder. The ends are pink this month. “Mr Two-Flats-and-a-Sports-Car?”

“That’s the one.”

“And? What’s he like?”

That is a very good question. I spent a long time in the dark last night deciding exactly what sort of man he is, and the theory I’d settled on by about half-past three—the one that had him running some vast criminal empire—seems a little less watertight this morning. I keep that part to myself, but I tell her about the pounding music, and how I went up to his flat with Penny tucked under my arm.

“You honestly went in your jammies?” Emmy asks after I’ve set the scene—big men, lots of alcohol, fighting on the TV.

“I went in my jammies,” I confirm. “And I asked Ryan very politely if he’d mind turning the music down. And do you know what he said? He said he wasn’t going to end his flat-warming early just because I’m a light sleeper. And Emmy, I’m not a light sleeper. I’m a completely regular sleeper.”

Emmy, who hasn’t touched her coffee since I started, lifts it now, nodding.

“Anyway, that’s when I lost it.”

She puts the cup straight back down. “You lost it? You?”

“Me.”

“The woman whose idea of swearing is saying ‘duck’?” She leans in, delighted. “Did you tell him to fuck off?”

“No! I didn’t say that. But I did tell him that the renovation has been really quite inconvenient.”

“Briony Sinclair.” She looks me up and down, apparently reassessing everything she knows about me. “I’m impressed. Not as impressed as I’d have been if you’d told him where to go, but still, not bad. Did you say about the shop? Did you tell him takings are down?”

“I tried. Or at least, I was going to, but that’s around when I became painfully aware I was standing in a stranger’s kitchen at two in the morning in stripy flannel pyjamas, holding a dog, and shouting at a roomful of people twice my size. I dried up.”

Emmy winces in sympathy. “Oh, Briony. Did he at least turn the music down?”

“No. After I left, it went on for another hour. And after that there were…after-party noises.”

“After-party noises?”

“You know.”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know.”

She smirks. “I really don’t think I do. Please explain.”

I’m suddenly very interested in the lid of my coffee cup. My ears have gone hot. This is, in fairness, entirely my own fault for raising it.

“Er…pleasure noises,” I say to the lid.

“Pleasure noises?” Emmy repeats, innocent as anything.

I glare at her. “Oh, come on, you know what I mean. Moaning! That sort of thing.”

And with that, Emmy is gone. Head back, shoulders shaking, gone.

I take a sullen sip of coffee and let her get on with it. Meanwhile, my brain, unhelpfully, cues the whole thing up again. The woman had been loud. Very loud. And underneath her, let’s say, exclamations, there had been male grunts. Those had been⁠—

Despicable. Certainly not sexy. Not sexy at all. And if I’d briefly thought so at four in the morning, then it was the sleep deprivation talking. I was a woman temporarily delirious from a catastrophic shortage of REM.