It got light at about half past six.
They did not sleep, and she has always been clear that this was not romance, it was that neither of them had anything left to lose by four in the morning and both of them knew there was a plane.
At seven she got up and stood at the window in his shirt.
"Don't say anything sensible," he said, from the bed.
"I wasn't going to."
"You are absolutely about to say something sensible. Your shoulders have gone up."
Simone Adeyemi looked out at a road in Frankfurt with the traffic starting on it.
"I'm going to write you a note," she said, "and then I am going to get on a plane, and I want you to know that this is the single most self-destructive thing I have ever done and that I am doing it on purpose."
"Why?"
"Because I have got three hundred people."
She turned round.
"Because I built a company out of a bedroom on Rye Lane and it runs on me being right about everything, and it has never made a penny, and there are four hundred thousand people who get paid on a Tuesday instead of in three weeks because eleven of us stayed up for four months in 2020.
"And if I turn round now and ask you your surname," said Simone Adeyemi, "then I am going to spend the next four years on a plane to Frankfurt instead of doing the thing I have been angry about since I was eleven. And I know that about myself. I have known it since I was about twenty-four."
The man in the bed did not say anything for a moment.
"That is the most annoying argument I have ever heard," he said, "and I cannot get round any part of it."
"No."
"I want it on the record that I have tried, since about six o'clock."
She wrote it on the pad by the telephone, which is the only paper in a hotel room, and she wrote it standing up in a shirt that was not hers.
Best night I've had since I was 22.
Not asking. Don't come and find me.
— the woman from the bar
He kept it for two years.
He has never told anybody that. It went into a wallet on the eleventh of March 2023 and it moved into a different wallet in the September of that year and it did not come out in between, and it was in the inside pocket of his jacket on the fourteenth of October two years and seven months later, in a meeting room on the fourth floor of a building in Southwark, when a woman came in and put her hand out and said:
"Simone Adeyemi. Anansi."