Two of the best coffees I've had on the app ended the same way: a booked table, a chair nobody sat in, and a message that stayed unread. I'm putting them in one entry because I learned the lesson twice, and the second time it cost more.

Shiina Shiina was the coffee you tell people about. Quick, funny, a bit chaotic in the way that makes you feel you've been let in on something. She talked over me, which I liked, and at one point stole a chip off my plate, which I liked more.

We booked dinner for the following week, a place with a half-private room I'd been meaning to try. The thread stayed warm right up to the day: exclamation marks, stickers, a "楽しみ！" the night before. I sent a confirmation on the afternoon. It went unread.

The app, unhelpfully, tells you when someone was last online. She'd been on it that evening. She was reading something. It wasn't me.

I waited outside for ten minutes, because sitting alone in a half-private room booked for two has a particular quality I didn't fancy, then went in and apologised to the front desk and asked to rebook. They waved the cancellation fee. I went home. I didn't send a second message, or a third, because a rule had formed on the walk to the station and it was this: a silent no-show before the first dinner is a no, and a no doesn't need a reply. Two unanswered messages is the ceiling. After that you're not asking a question, you're keeping her company.

I hid her, on LINE and on the app. Not blocked. This had repercussions, as we'll see later (Editor: That, dear reader, is called 'foreshadowing').

Saki

Saki was worse, because there was nothing to see.

She was twenty-one, from Fukushima. She was a piano student at a music university, teaching kids on the side. She was small and precise and laughed with her shoulders. Coffee was in July and it was, without competition, the best hour I'd had on the app. She asked about the band, and then asked follow-up questions about the band, which nobody does. A dinner in Shibuya came after, on a Friday. She matched me glass for glass with two pints of beer and a mega lemon sour.

I'd been sitting on two concert tickets for a major overseas act coming to Osaka and Tokyo. I got tickets to the Osaka gig. I offered them to her + hotel and tease - and a joke about what the hotel implied so she'd know I knew. She went home to Fukushima for a few days, checked her teaching schedule, and confirmed at 2:35 in the morning with more exclamation marks than the sentence needed. Somewhere in that trip she bought me manju from the station. She told me so. I have a souvenir for you. Let's talk Osaka on Thursday.

Thursday was a counter izakaya, booked, confirmed by her with a quote-reply, and at two that afternoon she put a sparkle reaction on my last message. At six I was at the counter. At 6:10 I sent a message. At 6:20 I finished the one beer I'd allowed myself, and left. Both unread. They're still unread.

I will always wonder what happened between the manju and the chair. A boyfriend, a phone in a river, a loss of nerve about a hotel, a family thing. Every version leaves the same trace: a sincere souvenir, a sincere 2:35am, and then a woman who couldn't type the sentence.

What I took from it Neither Shiina nor Saki had any warnings on their profiles. I went back through the threads looking for one, and there weren't any. That's the harder lesson. Warmth in the thread predicts whether you'll enjoy dinner. It has never once predicted whether dinner happens. The only thing that predicts a show-up is a previous show-up.

Maybe there's a structural reason the ones who vanish are so often the ones you'd least expect. The women who get to the top of the Board get there by being the warmest, funniest, most engaged threads on it. Those are also the women with the most options. The charm that puts her at the top of my list, is the same charm that lets her burn a confirmed table without it costing her much. I'm not excusing it. I'm just saying the surprise was mine to lose.

So the rules now: confirm the day before, not the day of. Two messages, then stop. Hide, don't block. Never book anything you can't cancel. And the budget for the empty chair rolls forward to the next one, because the next one is the point. There are many, many fish in the sea.