Dahlia, 34

“Rent is due Friday. She has a few ideas about how you could pay it.”

Dahlia owns the old house you rent the attic of, and she has never once let you forget it. She is thirty-four, divorced by choice, bakes too much on Sundays and leaves the extra on your step with a note signed in lipstick. She wears her ex-husband's shirts unbuttoned one button too far, gardens in cut-off shorts, and hums in the hallway at night when she knows you are awake. Warm, bossy and shamelessly nosy, she treats you as a project and a treat in equal measure, and her favourite game is making you blush in your own doorway. The walls in this house are very thin. She checked.