Later, Daniel slices the onion, peppers, courgette, carrots and broccoli into neat, perfect strips and drops them in a white bowl while the chicken sizzles in the frying pan, the windows steaming up around him. He's glad to be home, glad to be cooking, his thoughts distracted from the evening ahead.
'Are you sure you want to cook?' Samantha had asked earlier. 'I'm sure you made the meal last time Tom and Janine came round.'
'Honestly,' he'd said. 'I'm fine. You go and relax. I'm happy to do it.'
'And you don't want me to do anything? Not even lay the table?
He kissed her on the cheek.
'I just want you to relax. And remember,' he called as she walked up the stairs to the running bath, 'you're relaxing for two now, so take your time.'
As he pours another glass of Rioja, he notices the bottle is half empty already. He stands back from the hob and checks the time on his watch: quarter to eight. They'll be here in fifteen minutes. He takes a gulp of wine and the taste fills his mouth, rich and smooth.
Placing his glass on the sideboard, he tips the vegetables in with the meat and stirs the food with a long wooden spoon. He lifts the lid on the rice. It's almost done. He checks the time again, turns to the sink and washes up what he's used so far.
His opposite, Samantha leaves the kitchen as if someone has been in there with just five minutes to find something of great value. Her desk in the study is the same state with papers shrewn all over the place and post-it notes slapped over everything with urgent looking writing in red ink, underlined, circled: CALL JULIA, WRITE TO IGH WITH PROPOSAL, MEETING ON JULY 9TH AT 10AM.
When they'd first moved in with one another, Daniel had commented on her disorganisation, her messiness.
'Life's to short to worry about things like that,' Samantha had said simply in response.
And of course, she's right, but there's something about everything having its place that he likes, something about the compartmentalisation of a life that seems right. Even when he and Richard were children, he insisted on toys and books and games being labelled: blue for Richard, red for Daniel. Not that it made any difference back then since their mother discouraged them from having any individuality, treating and dressing them both the same ('It's easier than looking for different clothes for the both of you') until they were sent away to Broadoaks.
As a child, the notion of individuality wasn't one Daniel gave much thought. Of course he was aware that, unlike most people, there was someone in the world who shared his image, but he didn't think about the instinctive comparisons that people made between the two brothers.
No, that came later, before the first year of Broadoaks when his father called the two boys into his study.
Both Daniel and Richard had been surprised their father had let them into his office since he kept it so exclusively for his business work, and the boys could count on one hand the amount of times they'd been in there: once when they'd been caught trying to keep next door's cat in the playroom, once when Daniel had broken the window of the shed with a football, and once when their father was out and they wanted to see what exactly it was that kept him locked away for hours at a time.
The room smelt of paper and stationary – stale and lifeless – and the wallpaper, a deep maroon, robbed any light from within the four walls. Beside a huge window that looked out onto the immaculately cut lawn was a heavy mahogany desk on which stacks of files and paper were arranged in alphabetical order.
And behind these stacks was a leather chair in which their father sat.
That day, the two boys sat before their father as if they were in a job interview, their hands in their lap, their boyish faces serious.
'I'm not going to say much,' their father began in his deep voice, 'but I want you both to know how important the next few years are for you both.'
He'd gone onto explain how his sons were lucky to receive the education their parents had 'worked jolly hard for', how they must apply themselves to every subject, every minute of every lesson, how they should never settle for anything other than the best.
'Medicine is a difficult profession to get into,' he'd said finally. 'If you want to get to the top, you have to put in the work. That's where you want to be, isn't it? At the top.'
'Yes, Dad,' Richard said instantly.
Daniel felt his father's eyes on him. He looked up and their gaze met; two generations, one profession. The thought of studying medicine made his stomach turn; the thought of being the counsel someone sought to cease their pain made his hands hot and clammy.
His science wasn't even that good. His teachers had said so himself. He'd read it on the report card they'd sent back to his parents.
'Daniel applies himself and is a hard-worker,' Dr Venables, his science teacher wrote. 'But I feel that this is not his strongest subject.'
'You're just not trying hard enough,' his father had said on reading the report. 'You're not concentrating. You're bright, Daniel, it's obvious from reading the rest of this report. So why can't you put in some more effort?'
He'd said nothing in response, just shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing to say, anyway. Nothing that his father wanted to hear.
'Two sons,' he always said after a few drinks at Christmas and parties. 'I've got two sons to carry on my profession. That's the greatest feeling. It really is the greatest feeling.'
'Don't, John,' their mother would say. 'Let them make their own decisions.'
And then an argument would start, an argument about their futures that their mother never won. At time like this, Daniel and Richard would sit at the dinner table push food around their plates. It always felt like a lifetime before they were excused from the table and were able to disappear somewhere else in the house, somewhere they weren't treated like little adults as opposed to the children they were and never allowed to be.
'Daniel?' His father asked that day in his office, leaning across the desk. 'You want to be at the top, don't you?'
He nodded.
'I can't hear you,' his father said. 'Where do you want to be?'
'At the top.'
As the words left his mouth, he knew they weren't the truth, but as his father sat back in his chair with a smile on his face, he saw that he'd been convinced. And it was at that point he realised how easy it was to lie.
Hearing Samantha's footsteps in the bedroom above him now, Daniel checks the time once again. It's five to. They'll be here soon. He finishes his glass of wine. It'll be fine, he tells himself, drumming his fingers on the worktop. It will all be just fine, fine, fine.

Tom and Janine are the first to arrive, and Samantha meets them in the hall, taking their jackets and hanging them on the coat stand as they discuss how summer seems a distant memory already.
'Daniel,' Tom says in his usual loud voice as he and Janine walk into the kitchen. The two men shake hands. 'How are you? Good day?'
'We were at a funeral, Tom.'
His friend nods solemnly. 'Good send off?'
'You could say that.'
'Nothing worse than a miserable funeral,' Tom says, and the room drops to silence.
'Who'd like a glass of wine?' Samantha asks, chirpy as she walks to the fridge. 'We've a bottle of Chablis in here. Lovely and cool.'
Daniel and Samantha have been friends with Tom and Janine since the two women worked together at [somewhere] nearly ten years ago. Samantha had invited Janine and her husband to dinner one evening and, though Daniel had originally found Tom too forthright, too loud, the two couples had soon gone on to become friends.
At just over six foot, and with a rugby player's build, Tom is as loud in appearance as he is in volume while Janine, petite and timid, is completely his opposite. And yet they are simply ideal for each other, finishing each other's sentences and as tactile today as the first day they met.
'That's what I mean,' Samantha said when Daniel first pointed their unlikely coupling. 'Couples aren't meant to be reflections of one another. The beauty is in the difference.'
'Samantha mentioned an old friend of yours is coming this evening, Daniel,' Janine says now, leaning back against the breakfast bar. 'It must have been strange to have seen him after so long.'
Daniel nods and pours himself another glass of wine.
'I suppose it was,' he says, and can hear a slight slur in his words that suggests he's already had too much to drink. 'The last time I saw him, he was a boy. And now he's a man.'
With that, there's a knock on the door.
'I'll get it,' Samantha says, walking out of the kitchen as Daniel pours himself another glass of wine.

At the table, the two couples face one another while Anthony sits at the end between Daniel and Samantha.
'This is wonderful, Samantha,' Janine says in her soft Irish accent as she folds a fajita wrap. 'Really tasty.'
'I can't take the credit for this one,' Samantha smiles. 'Daniel was chef this evening.'
Janine raises her eyebrows and looks to Tom. 'Did you hear that? You could learn a thing or two here.' She addresses the rest of the table. 'Tom's idea of cooking is taking things out of boxes and putting them in the microwave. Or the oven, if he's feeling adventurous.'
'I'm time efficient,' Tom protests.
'That's one way of describing it,' Janine laughs, and everyone laughs with her.
Anthony tops up everyone's wine glasses, raises a toast.
'To the chef,' he says as Daniel catches his eye. 'And new beginnings.'
Five wine glasses chime over the table and in that moment the room is filled with warmth, but as conversation flows around him, Daniel is quiet, eating slowly despite being hungry.
The wine he drank while preparing the meal has left him anxious that he's slurring his words, and so he just listens to all that's going on around him, nodding, smiling, raising his eyebrows at appropriate times.
All the while, he's aware of Anthony sitting beside him. Twice already he, Daniel, has looked up to catch his gaze.
'What about you, Daniel?' He hears Tom ask. 'How's your week been?'
'Fine,' he says. 'Fine. Back to work on Monday after the summer holidays.'
Janine fills her tortilla wrap and reaches for the sour cream.
'I suppose a lot of new students will be coming to see you,' she says.
Daniel nods. 'Some new faces, some old.'
'Speaking of which,' Janine says, holding up her wineglass for a top-up. 'Anthony, Daniel told me you two haven't seen one another since school?'
'Not once.'
'It's amazing, isn't it? You spend every day for five years with someone, then you don't see them for twenty. It's a shame really.'
'It feels a million years ago now,' says Tom. 'I don't know how you do it, Daniel, I really don't. All that angst. Doesn't it get to you after a while?'
'Not really. It was worse when I was a GP, when people came with aches and pains that they couldn't even locate and wanted a quick fix. With counselling, they talk, I listen, and we work on things together.'
'What would you have said to yourself back then?' Anthony asks, his eyes on Daniel's. 'If the sixteen year old you came to see you as a counsellor now, what would you say?'
'Good question,' Janine says, leaning back in her chair and bringing her wine glass to her lips. 'Very good question.'
There's a silence in the room that lasts a moment longer than is comfortable.
'Come on, Daniel,' Samantha says. 'What would you say?'
'I'm thinking.'
'Drinking, more like.'
After another moment passes with only the sound of cutlery on plates, Daniel says, 'I'd say, 'All of this will pass.''
'That's vague,' Samantha says.
'That's my answer.'
Tom grins. 'A man of mystery. I like it.'