Somewhere in the first year or two of living together, most couples quietly invent a language. Nobody sits down and drafts it. It assembles itself out of habit and repetition until a lamp left on at a certain angle, or the sound of a particular drawer opening, carries more meaning than a sentence…

Somewhere around 1:40 in the morning, in a bedroom that looks entirely unremarkable from the street, a woman is performing a manoeuvre she has never once described out loud. Slowly, in increments, using the weight of one shin as an anchor, she is reclaiming eleven inches of duvet. Her husband is…

There is a browser tab that almost never survives the evening. It gets opened somewhere between the first date ending well and the second one being agreed to, it stays open for anywhere from four minutes to a slightly embarrassing forty, and then it gets closed with the particular efficiency of a…