Svitlana and I didn’t talk about our relationship, nor its end. I just passed, by degrees, from being her lover and dom to being her life coach. There’s always some overlap between those roles, so that came easily enough.

In the next step I became her lesbian dating counsellor: “Call her! Of course she wants to hear from you!” She didn’t fuck her lesbian dating counsellor, because she was getting limited amounts of sex from the new girl, and was starting to fall in love.

In all good remainder shops!

I turned out to be reasonably good at giving lesbian dating advice. Women tell other women a lot of things that they don’t tell men. But they also tell men some things that they don’t tell to women. Mostly men aren’t listening, so this doesn’t influence the world as much as it should.

But it means that men, if they listen at least sometimes, know some things about women that other women mostly don’t know. Or acknowledge.

There’s probably a book in that. “Straight Men’s Sex and Dating Tips for Lesbians.” A short book, with tiny sales, but never mind.

Anyway, Svitlana got the girl, with a bit of help from me, and as a consequence I lost Svitlana. I wasn’t being noble. I’d always known that though Svitlana was absolutely a blessing in my life, she was going to be a temporary one. What I lost was never mine.

One evening, though, we were having what turned out to be our second-to-last one-to-one conversation. Svitlana knew that it was going to be one of our last meetings. I didn’t, of course. She said, “Have you ever been in touch with that girl you used to know? Tiana?”