I found the first one in a kitchen cupboard, a ring of dust where some bowls had been. The shelves were all half empty. I’d been giving away a lot of things. After that, I started seeing them in all kinds of places – circles of water, circles of shadow. I started making meanings from them. That’s what happens when you get something in your head and you live on your own. All your thoughts become true.

Across the city, businesses were closing. At the end of my street, an office cleared out and stood vacant for a while. Then it became a cafe, not a real one but a makeshift place, with trestle tables and milking stools. I spent a lot of time there, sitting by the window, looking at the trees in the park. I flicked the pages of magazines and watched people talking over drinks, running hands through their hair, scratching the corners of their mouths. I read the profiles of a hundred men on the app and wondered whether it might not be preferable to spend my life alone.

One afternoon, I swiped right on a man with a large face, a swatch of dirty brown hair, small eyes and grey stubble. He looked large in the photo, broad-shouldered and muscular, though it was always hard to tell. He worked in design. He had a daughter, thirteen years old. He liked canoeing and spaghetti. His guilty pleasure was enjoying a cigarette immediately after he’d been to the gym. He was clever, I thought, to mention the gym this way – without being obvious, without seeming to brag. In one of his photos, he was wearing a grey marl vest. There was a wobbly circle tattooed on his arm. I looked at the picture for some time. I kept coming back to the tattoo. It wasn’t long before he messaged me and we arranged to meet.

The first date went well. He was grumpy in a way that I enjoyed. It reassured me that he was easily displeased – he was discerning, I thought. I had been right about his body. He was tall with strong arms. I liked the heaviness he had around the middle, the way it pushed against the buttons of his shirt. He smelled good, too – a bit like cinnamon and a bit like sweat. When I arrived, he pulled me into an awkward hug – the way you might hug a cousin you hadn’t seen for a long time – then he kissed my face very close to my ear. It felt completely normal, as though our bodies had met before.

We got the basic stuff out of the way quickly – jobs, divorces, holidays, the recent, unseasonable warm spell. We didn’t delve too much into politics or the general state of the world. Mostly, we talked about interesting things. He told me that watching certain films had made him feel differently about his life, how when he wanted to cry he knew which songs to play on his phone. I wondered if this was an act – if he wished to appear sensitive, emotionally attuned – but in the end I didn’t care because the films and songs he referenced were all pretty good. I talked about my favourite sunsets, the ones I saw from the bus on my way home from work. I showed him pictures: the pink one with the big blue clouds, the one that glowed green through the rain. I told him I hated peonies and any flower you could put in a vase, that I liked plants to be ugly and wild. Giant foxgloves, cow parsley by the motorway. He said he had taught himself the phases of the moon and could always tell if it was perfectly full or starting to wane.

I knew that he found me endearing; I suspected he found me attractive. From time to time, I saw him looking directly at my mouth or at the line of my collarbone.

‘Do you have pets?’ he asked towards the end of the meal.

‘No, never.’

‘Thank God,’ he said.

He hardly mentioned his daughter, but men with children were often like that. Either they pretended that their kids didn’t exist, or they presented them to me like a gift, as though I ought to be terribly grateful that they might be willing to share. He paid for dinner and I didn’t protest. I told him I’d pay the next time and he mentioned some other places we could try.

The night air was fresher than usual, indigo blue instead of black. He asked me where I needed to go and if he could walk me there – he didn’t mind going out of his way. We said goodbye at the top of a flight of stone steps. He was warm and my skin was cool. I felt myself reaching up towards him; my palms tingled, as if dissolving. I kept thinking that if either one of us lost our balance then we’d both come crashing down. A few days later, he sent me a picture of a sunset where the sun was a bright copper circle – ugly, like a coin.

There were many subsequent dates. We ate gnudi at a noisy Italian in the suburbs. We queued in hot weather for tom yam soup. On Sundays, we went for long walks by the river. Sometimes we brought a picnic; sometimes we walked until we were hungry then slipped off the riverside path in search of lunch. We didn’t spend much time in each other’s houses; we both liked our own space. When he did stay over at mine, we’d go out for breakfast the morning after. I didn’t like sharing my kitchen table – I did all my thinking there.

We preferred cafes with seats outside. We liked to smoke with our coffees, though we never smoked at night. We ate eggs, fried potatoes and mushrooms that leaked their juices. We drank large carafes of water to make up for the caffeine and the salt. Afterwards, I’d be left with a burnt taste in my mouth.

Our best conversations took place while one of us was walking the other to the nearest bus stop. When our time was nearly up, we felt free to say important things. It was during one of those conversations that he told me his father had died and I told him that my mother had too. I told him that I still talked to her like I had as a teenager after school, sitting at the kitchen table. He was tender towards me; he listened carefully. I liked looking at our reflections when we passed shop windows at night – our two shadowy figures, his large and rounded, mine slim and angular. We made each other more attractive, I thought. We made each other better in general.

His daughter stayed with him for a couple of nights a week, sometimes longer during the holidays. She was an interesting young person, he said – unusually intuitive.

‘She doesn’t have a lot of friends,’ he told me, over tacos. ‘Her mother worries about that, but I don’t.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Why doesn’t she have friends?’

‘Why don’t you worry about it like her mother?’

‘She’s fussy,’ he said. He drained the last of his margarita. ‘She’s good at being on her own. She respects herself.’

For the first few months, he had only good things to say – about me, about his daughter. He complained about his job, which was normal. He complained about his house, which was always in some state of disrepair. But with me, he was patient and kind. He laughed at my jokes and was generous about my appearance. He liked my clothes, even the ones that had belonged to my grandfather – clothes that other men I’d known had hated. He often spoke of his daughter’s intelligence, her artistic pursuits. It was only later – and after he’d had an unusual amount to drink – that he explained how she could make life difficult for him. There had been other girlfriends, he said. His daughter had driven them away.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘She’s just a child.’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘I guess she has a manipulative streak.’

That night, I sat at the kitchen table with my mother. I’d poured her a drink, which usually made her laugh – I’m dead! she’d scream, as if I didn’t know – but this time she was calm.

‘What did he mean?’ I asked her. ‘Manipulative?’

He means he loves the things he loves when they don’t cause him any trouble, my mother said. That’s what he wants you to understand.