In Case You Missed It

CHAPTER SIX

Everyone has a Patrick.

Adrian’s words echoed in my ears all the way home to my shed. Was it true? Did everyone have someone who made them feel this way? Light-headed and loose-limbed and like they might have forgotten their own name? Because if they did, someone should have warned me before things got as bad as they did. No matter how many songs I heard or books I read or films I watched, no one had ever quite managed to put into words how I’d felt about Patrick Parker. The whole time we were together, I melted at the thought of him even as I seized up with fear that I would somehow breathe the wrong way and ruin it all. He made the sun shine, the moon glow, I had a secret smile that was just for him and there was nothing I wouldn’t have done if he’d asked. He took my breath from the moment we met and I didn’t get it back for nine whole months.

And then it was over.

I turned the music up in my earphones as I rounded the corner of my parents’ road, trying to drown out the memories.

Sumi once told me everything in life was an equation, that everything had a value and could all be worked out with maths. With relationships, you took the length of time you were together, added how desperately in love you were, then multiplied it by the degree of pain of the ending to find out how badly it would affect you. There were other variables: the amount of time you’d been crushing on someone before you got together (add ten), how good the sex had been (multiply by a hundred), unforgiving habits or unappealing fetishes (subtract accordingly) and, eventually, divide by the amount of time since the end of the relationship. That was how long it would take you to get over someone.

It was a straightforward solution for Sumi; her friend was the happiest she’d ever been and then, in a matter of moments, became the most heartbroken human alive, meaning there was only one conclusion: my ex was evil. But for me, it was more complicated. I needed more than just maths to figure out Patrick and me. Maybe one of those fancy calculators they’d made us buy in Year Eight but literally never showed us how to use. Was this what the ‘sine’ button was for?

All that was left now was a bittersweet aching, tender at the heart but warm around the edges. It was the kind of pain that felt good to press on from time to time. When I looked at my phone I was anxious and excited and sad and scared but also, there was no point lying to myself, incredibly turned on.

Instead of walking down the driveway directly to my shed, I pulled out the key to my parents’ front door and skipped up the steps. There were no lights on inside, my parents were probably asleep already, but I’d left all my old diaries in the loft when I went away and I needed them. The written word was more reliable than memories.

The house was quiet, except for the ticking of the hallway clock and the occasional clack of the boiler in the understairs cupboard. It didn’t matter that it was July, a day did not go by when my mother did not have the heating on. What if the queen was driving past, her car broke down and she wanted a bath and we didn’t have any hot water? It just wouldn’t do. What would the neighbours think?

I was rifling through the post in the hall when I heard a sound coming from the living room.

‘Bugger me, that’s cold.’

Clearly my dad, clearly complaining. Even though all I wanted to do was get my diaries and retreat to my shed with my memories and the enormous bar of chocolate I’d bought at the train station, I couldn’t imagine a version of events where I didn’t get an almighty bollocking for not coming in to say hello before I started creeping around in the loft.

‘Only me,’ I called, as breezy as I could manage, pushing open the living room door. ‘I’m going to pop into the loft and – oh my God.’

My parents were sitting at the dinner table, or, to be more specific, my mum was sitting at the dinner table, a pair of chopsticks in her hand, and my dad was on top of it, his eyes wide open, mouth clamped shut and his naked body covered in sushi.

‘Hello, love,’ Mum said calmly, standing to reveal she was wearing nothing other than a full-length apron featuring a blacksmith’s body on the front, which I remembered Jo bringing back from a school trip to Ironbridge. She leaned across the table and puffed out a candle burning awfully close to a sensitive part of my father’s anatomy, which thankfully had been covered with a napkin.

‘We thought you’d already gone to bed,’ she said, her face fixed in a tense smile.

‘And I thought you’d put the chain on the door,’ Dad muttered through a clenched jaw, not moving so much as a muscle.

Horrified, I was stuck to the spot. Why did this keep happening to me? Why couldn’t I have walked in on something civil, like some nice armed robbers, instead?

‘Are you hungry?’ Mum asked, smiling at me with manic eyes.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again,’ I replied. ‘I mean, no. I’m fine, thank you. This is all fine.’

‘You said you’re going into the loft?’

I nodded, holding onto the door handle as though it were the only thing keeping me upright.

‘Be careful with the ladder,’ Mum cautioned lightly as a salmon roll slid slowly off Dad’s chest and fell onto the carpet. ‘Your dad oiled it when we put Jo’s stuff up there and it sometimes comes down a bit fast.’

‘OK, thanks, good to know,’ I said, walking backwards out of the living room and closing the door firmly behind me. ‘Perhaps it’ll hit me in the head and I’ll get amnesia and forget everything I just saw.’

When I got upstairs, I looked at my hand and saw I was still shaking. Did I need to start wearing a bell around my neck? What was wrong with people? I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the task at hand rather than the tuna rolls that had been covering my dad’s nipples.

‘Get the diaries,’ I mumbled to myself, using the torch on my phone to light up at least four lifetimes’ worth of cardboard boxes. ‘Get the diaries, go back to the shed, bleach your eyes and go to sleep.’

Ignoring the boxes marked ‘Books’, ‘Ornaments’ and ‘Kitchen stuff’ in my block lettering, I reached for a smaller box labelled ‘Ros’s Shit’. It was nice of my sister to help me pack up, I thought, frowning at her looping handwriting. Holding it tightly under one arm, I made my way carefully back down the ladder.

‘Night Mum, night Dad,’ I shouted as I dashed past the living room and into the kitchen, making a beeline for the back door.

‘Christ almighty, Gwen,’ I heard my dad screech. ‘Careful with the bloody wasabi.’

Once I was showered, scoured and tucked up in bed, I opened up the box. It wasn’t just my diaries I’d kept, there were all manner of mementos, including one special shoebox dedicated to all things Ros and Patrick. A beer mat from the bar we went to on our first date, an Indian takeaway menu he’d scrawled his number on, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign I’d nicked from the hotel when we’d gone on a minibreak to Dublin.

Dublin …

I turned the flimsy cardboard sign over in my fingers, remembering the thrill of first-time hotel sex, tearing each other’s clothes off as soon as we walked in the room, not even making it to the bed. But there was also the terrible afternoon we’d spent traipsing around the city in the rain, looking for the house from Dubliners, only to discover it had been knocked down years before. He’d been so annoyed, I’d tried to assuage him with a trip to a whisky distillery and given myself my worst hangover of the decade, which only annoyed him further. It was impossible to vomit subtly in a hotel bathroom. But those parts were easy to forget when I remembered the first day, spinning through the streets hand in hand, eyes only for each other, laughing and breathing and feeling so free. And did I mention the hotel sex? I would never be the same woman again.

This diary still felt new compared to some of the others in the box, the ones covered in stickers and scribbles, postcards of bands stuck to the front, whose songs I could barely remember now, but had meant everything to me once upon a time. The creamy pages were thick and lush between my fingers – total stationery porn – and my illegible handwriting looped and sloped all over the place, ballooning off the lines on some pages, slanted with the speed of my script on others. The first few entries were full to bursting, words running into each other as I documented my every thought and feeling, from meeting Patrick at some ridiculous party I’d been dragged to by my parents, to the first date, the first touch, the first kiss, the first everything else. It was all written down, the things I couldn’t say out loud, not even to Sumi or Lucy. It felt alien to me now: had I ever felt this strongly about anything? I certainly hadn’t felt even a fraction of this since we broke up. My love bled through the page with blistering vulnerability and it was almost too painful to read. Cool, composed, sophisticated, intellectual, passionate, gorgeous, bold, brave, adventurous Patrick was mine and I was ecstatic.

And then the anxiety crept in. The concerns, the worrying, the second-guessing. He cancelled a date, was he over me? He forgot we made plans, did he not care? Was I ever even good enough for him? It was a side of myself I didn’t care to be reminded of.

By the time we got to the end of the nine months, twenty-two days and fourteen hours, my writing didn’t flow quite so freely and I’d eased up considerably on the adjectives. Just the facts, ma’am. I told him about the job offer in DC, he said I should take it, he wanted to go travelling anyway. A clean break is always for the best. No hard feelings, let’s stay in touch, yeah? And then nothing. I’d left this diary behind and given up keeping one altogether. The only record of my time in America was in photo form, tiny digital squares of memories saved on my laptop and not nearly as affecting.

A handful of photographs fell into my lap, blurry, overexposed candids, a million miles away from the pictures we took on our phones. Every photograph I took now was ruthlessly cropped, filtered and edited, and anything less than deeply flattering was immediately discarded into the digital wasteland. These were different. I leafed through them, smiling. It wasn’t that long ago but we all looked so much younger, sharper angles but softer edges. We took disposable cameras everywhere that summer, me, Sumi and Lucy, determined to break free of our phones, an ahead-of-the-curve digital detox. It lasted exactly one month until Sumi balked at the price of film development and I ran the camera we’d taken to Lucy’s hen do through the wash.

There was a rush in these photos you couldn’t get in phone pics, I realized, tracing the curve of my arm in another photo: it was slung carelessly around Patrick’s neck, my head thrown back, him holding a hand out towards the camera to wave the photographer away but still laughing. So much genuine emotion packed into one frame that I suddenly had to wonder if our ancestors had been right all along. Did the flash steal your soul? Did we give a piece of ourselves away with every selfie?

There was one photo in particular, curled at the edges and sticky on the back from a time it had taken pride of place on my wall, one photo that hit me right in the heart. It was me and Patrick at Lucy’s wedding. Lucy had given it to me, rather than keeping it for the album, it felt too personal, too intimate, to share with strangers. The sun was behind us, a bright white light sharply lining our features, and we were holding hands, eyes on each other, as though we were the only two people on earth. Our faces were inches apart, either pre- or post-kiss, I couldn’t recall, but we looked so happy. So, so happy. And three weeks after it was taken, we broke up.

Slipping the photos back in the diary, I threw it as far as I could. About four feet. The shed really wasn’t very big. I pulled the sheets up to my chin and let out a loud huff. Probably not the best idea right before bed, I thought as I threw my hot and bothered body around, my legs tangling themselves up in the bed clothes as I went.

Grunting, I reached for my phone and opened my messages.

There it was, bold as brass, clear as day.

Hello stranger.

I placed the phone back on the nightstand and draped one arm over my face, covering my eyes. Maybe if I lay there long enough, stayed still enough, I would forget about the text and fall asleep.

I lasted ten seconds.

With a loud sigh, I reached for my phone again.

Hello stranger.

It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Tell me you didn’t text him back.’

‘I did not text him back.’

It was the truth. I had not replied to Patrick’s text. I’d slept for what felt like fifteen minutes, taken two cold showers, listened to the foxes living and loving in my parents’ back garden, eaten half a tub of Nutella straight out the jar, read several chapters of Starting Over, chosen my least-worst New Job outfit from my limited wardrobe and hunted for my ex up and down the internet to no avail but I had not replied to Patrick’s text.

Striding down the street, on my way to my first morning at work, I lifted my chin to feel the sun on my face.

‘I didn’t text him,’ I said. ‘But I really want to.’

A short, exasperated sigh whistled down the line.

‘I know you do,’ Sumi said kindly after collecting herself. ‘But you can’t, Ros. Honestly, I don’t know why you even still have his number in your phone.’

‘I didn’t have his number in my phone, it was in the cloud!’ I protested. ‘When the girl in the shop downloaded all my information to the new one, she used a back-up from the cloud. She said it would be quicker than doing a phone-to-phone transfer.’

‘You never save anything to the cloud!’ Sumi admonished me. ‘You don’t really want all your personal information flying around out there in cyberspace, do you?’

I shrugged. If it meant I didn’t have to remember my passwords or credit card numbers when I wanted to order a pizza, I was happy to be part of the problem.

‘Please don’t text him, Ros,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s such a bad idea.’

‘Is it?’ I wondered out loud. ‘Because I was thinking about it last night and I think closure might be a good idea.’

‘I’ll give you closure, we’ll role-play.’ She cleared her throat and deepened her voice. ‘Hello, Ros, I’m Patrick. I think I’m really clever because I’ve read a lot of books and written one or two but I’ve actually got the emotional maturity of a shoe and not a very nice one.’

I shook my head and smiled as I walked past a coffee shop, remembering the coffees and pastries he’d brought back to his flat the first morning after the first night before.

‘Do you think he misses me?’ I asked. ‘Do you think that’s why he sent the text?’

‘I don’t know what he’s thinking,’ Sumi admitted. ‘But I do know he broke your heart and I’m not down for you to give him a chance to do it again.’

‘Probably just being nice,’ I reasoned. ‘Replying out of politeness. I did send him the first text, after all.’

Sumi burst out laughing. ‘Ros. When was Patrick ever nice? Or polite?’

It was a fair point. He was a lot of things but nice wasn’t one of them. But who wanted nice? Nice was just a polite word for boring. Patrick was adventurous and passionate and bold and even though I tried so hard not to, now he was back in my head, I missed him so much I could taste it.

‘It has been a while, what if he’s changed?’

‘He could have been turned into a unicorn that’s been tasked with protecting the Holy Grail and I still wouldn’t think it was a good idea to text him,’ she replied, blunt as ever. ‘You were together six months and it’s taken you three years to get over him. Don’t do this to yourself.’

‘It was nine months,’ I corrected. ‘Almost ten.’

Nine months, twenty-two days and twenty-three hours if we were being precise. Accuracy was important to me.

‘You were together nine months, almost ten,’ Sumi repeated. ‘Then you were offered an amazing job opportunity that didn’t mean you had to break up but he knocked the whole thing on the head without giving it a second thought.’

‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I was there, I remember.’

‘I just don’t want you to get hurt again,’ Sumi groaned. ‘This is so like him, so casual, so vague. What if you reply, get your hopes up, and then he tells you he’s married with kids?’

The thought of Patrick being legally tied to someone else hit me like a wet haddock. I slowed down in the street, suddenly sick to my stomach.

‘And you already know it’s a bad idea,’ she added, her voice softening slightly. ‘If you’d wanted someone to tell you to text him, you’d have called the soft-touch, not me.’

She meant Lucy. Lucy was, in fairness, very persuadable.

‘Enough about that Twat-Faced Wank Chops,’ Sumi said, invoking her favourite nickname for him, before I could add fuel to the Patrick Parker conversation fire. ‘Are you excited for your first day at work?’

‘Nervously optimistic?’ I replied. Patrick’s message had worn the edges off my giddiness but I was still a bundle of happy nerves when I thought about it. ‘I’ve got loads of ideas, I think it’s going to be good.’

‘It’s going to be brilliant,’ she corrected. ‘Have fun, be amazing and do not spend the entire day thinking about Patrick “I’ve got a PhD and not in the dirty way” Parker.’

‘But also in the dirty way,’ I reminded her.

‘Thinking about his knob is not going to improve matters, so stop it,’ Sumi warned. ‘No thinking about him, no looking at photos of him and definitely no texting him. These are my commandments, Ros, I command thee. Thou hast been commanded.’

‘I’m sure I’ll be far too busy for him to even cross my mind,’ I assured her even though we both knew I could be put in charge of air traffic control at Heathrow and I’d still manage somehow. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Love you.’

‘Love you,’ Sumi replied. ‘Don’t text him!’

‘Sorry for all the smoke and mirrors yesterday,’ Ted said, leading me out of the bright and colourful PodPad HR office and down a markedly less bright and colourful staircase I hadn’t seen the day before. ‘But we’ve signed a million NDAs for this show and I couldn’t tell you anything until you’d signed a contract.’

‘No problem,’ I answered without hesitation, jogging closely behind him. Why were we leaving the Cool Office? Why was he leading me into the basement? ‘My curiosity is officially piqued. What’s the show about?’

Ted stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gave me a grin. ‘What was your last show about?’ he asked.

Someone enjoyed exercising power wherever he could find it.

‘The Book Report?’ I replied. ‘It was a culture show, book-based, obviously, clue’s in the name. The host interviewed a different author every week, asked them about their favourite books, you know, from different stages of their life. I developed it from scratch, got to work with the authors, the publishers, everything.’

He fumbled with an enormous ring full of keys and opened a heavy security door. ‘You like books?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘A lot. You?’

‘Eh,’ he grimaced as he pulled open the door in a pantomime of chivalry. ‘Not really a book man.’

Not really a book man.

‘Is the new show book-related?’ I asked as we walked down a dimly lit corridor, a prickle of excitement running up my spine as fluorescent lights clicked into life one by one above us. ‘Because it’s a great format, super easy to put together. If we find the right host, it could be up and running in a few weeks.’

‘Here’s the thing,’ Ted stopped short in front of one of six identical plywood doors. ‘We’ve already got a show for you. PodPad signed an incredibly talented person and they have the potential to be massive but they need the right producer to help them. Someone creative, someone who isn’t afraid to take risks, someone who can get a brilliant show out of a brilliant mind.’

‘And I’m that producer?’ I asked, a little surprised but pleasantly flattered.

He clicked his tongue and shot at me with double-finger guns.

‘So,’ I said, bracing myself against the sudden drop in temperature. Downstairs was much colder than upstairs. ‘Who is the incredibly talented person and why are we in the basement?’

‘This is where the studios are, soundproofing, yeah?’ He opened the door to a tiny, dark, dingy room and suddenly I was very nostalgic for the home comforts of my shed. ‘And you’re not going to believe it when I tell you. It’s insane that we’ve been able to get him, totally mad. Even I can’t believe we got him and I’m the one who signed the massive cheque for the bastard. He’s a genius. And not a book genius, like, a proper genius normal people have heard of.’

My heart began to pound and not just because I was incredibly claustrophobic. Here it was at last, my opportunity to put myself on the map, show everyone what I could do, working with a non-book genius. Who could it be? Lin-Manuel Miranda? The Rock? Anyone but Kanye.

‘OK, the anticipation is killing me,’ I said, watching Ted flick six switches on at the wall only to see half as many bulbs light up. ‘Who is it?’

He sat down in a beaten-up leather office chair that had been patched up with duct tape one too many times and grinned. ‘He’s an athlete.’

‘David Beckham?’ I guessed, heart pounding. I couldn’t do it to Posh and the kids obviously but a feverish flirtation would probably be morally acceptable.

‘Bigger,’ Ted grinned.

‘Roger Federer?’

‘Even bigger,’ he replied, eyes closed and hands up in the air, ready to conduct an invisible orchestra. ‘It’s Snazzlechuff.’

It was at that precise moment I realized I had followed a man I did not know into a soundproofed basement with no idea about his mental state and, to make matters worse, I was wearing shitty kitten heels that would never in a million years be able to penetrate his skull if I needed to use them as a weapon.

‘Excuse me?’ I said, very politely.

‘It’s Snazzlechuff,’ Ted repeated. ‘Snazzle. Chuff.’

‘Are you having a seizure? Should I get help?’ I asked, looking around for signs of human life besides the two of us. I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Murdered to Death on the train to work.

‘You’ve never heard of Snazzlechuff?’

I shook my head as I calculated my best possible route of escape. Probably bash him in the head with my backpack, bolt back upstairs, grab one of the free beers and launch myself through the plate-glass window.

‘He’s literally the most famous person in the entire world,’ Ted said, not even trying to hide the disdain on his face. ‘He’s got the most successful gaming channel in history, more than 15 million followers across all platforms and you’ve never even heard of him?’

He shoved his phone in my face, waving it around until I grabbed it out of his hands.

‘This is him?’

Ted nodded.

‘Why’s he got a dog’s head?’

The picture in front of me showed a skinny body, clothed head to toe in a bright red tracksuit, with an enormous Wes-Anderson-looking Dalmatian’s head on its shoulders.

‘He always wears a mask,’ Ted explained. ‘It’s part of his mystique.’

‘What’s his real name?’

‘No one knows,’ he replied, waving his fingers around and making spooky noises. ‘He’s an enigma.’

‘You said you signed his cheque?’ I said as I swiped through the photos. ‘Surely that had his name on it?’

‘Cheque went to his agent.’

‘I thought you said he was an athlete?’ I said, deflating by the second. Bye-bye David Beckham, farewell Roger Federer, see you in my dreams. Both at the same time, hopefully.

‘He’s an e-sports athlete,’ he explained. ‘He’s a god on YouTube.’

‘Then that explains it,’ I replied, folding up my dreams of a workplace romance and storing them neatly next to my Ted-might-be-a-serial-killer anxieties. ‘I’m not really a YouTube woman.’

He sat forward and peered at my forehead.

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-two but very dehydrated,’ I said, tossing my hair to cover as much of my face as possible. ‘So, when am I meeting this superstar? Is he here?’

‘Course not,’ he answered. ‘It’s Wednesday, he’s at school.’

It just got better and better.

‘How old is he, Ted?’ I asked.

My new boss scratched his stubble thoughtfully. ‘I want to say fifteen but he could be a tall twelve. It’s very hard to tell with kids these days, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ I agreed readily, wondering whether or not I could drive the heel of my shoe through my own temple if I was truly dedicated to the act.

‘He’s not like a normal kid though,’ Ted assured me. ‘He’s clever. And funny! So it doesn’t matter that you’re not.’

I looked around the studio, such as it was. Cheaply painted dark grey walls covered in black soundproofing, like foam egg boxes that had been dipped in tar, flickering fluorescent overhead lights and a filthy sheet of glass that separated the producer’s bay from the recording booth. It was covered with so many handprints it looked as though it had recently been used to reenact that scene in the back of the car in Titanic. God forbid I ever turn a black light on the room, I thought to myself. The whole place was crying out for an anti-bac wipe. Or a nuclear blast. One or the other.

‘If I’m being totally honest with you, I haven’t really done anything like this before,’ I said, tugging at the sleeve of my smart white shirt. ‘Not that I’m not up for the challenge but it isn’t something I have a lot of experience in. You’re all right with me learning on the job?’

Ted waved away my concerns with an unmoved ‘pfft’.

‘Mate,’ he replied, even though we were not mates. ‘If you can make books sound interesting enough for people to tune into your show, think what you’ll be able to do with a genuinely fascinating subject like e-sports!’

‘You really mean that, don’t you?’ I asked, glancing around the studio-slash-dungeon one more time.

‘I most certainly do,’ he said with a grave nod. ‘You’re welcome.’

‘And this is only the studio? I don’t have to stay down here all the time?’ I asked, afraid I already knew the answer. ‘My desk’s upstairs, right?’

‘Thing is,’ Ted sucked the air in through his teeth like he was about to tell me my carburettor needed replacing. ‘We’re short on desks at the moment. But you can do a bit of decorating if you like? With your own money.’

He rapped his knuckles on the desk and its loosely attached drawer crashed to the floor.

‘We can probably get you a new one of those,’ he muttered, kicking it away as I held my breath.

Run, commanded the voice in my head. Run far and run fast. But I refused to listen, that was just fear talking, according to Starting Over. The fear of failure and the even more powerful fear of success. I would not stand in my own way, I would embrace this opportunity and succeed. I would also bring in my own cleaning products from home.

‘Just so I’m absolutely, one hundred percent clear about everything,’ I said, running a finger along the mixing desk and balking at the filth. ‘The job I just signed a contract for is to produce a podcast about e-sports with a YouTube child star?’

Ted gave a single, eyes-askance nod.

‘Didn’t you say you lived in a shed?’ he asked.

‘So,’ I said, taking a deep breath in and giving my new boss a bright and glittering smile. ‘When do I meet Mr Snazzlechuff?’

After Ted left me alone to wallow in my pit, I sat at the desk and stared at my reflection in the glass partition between the studio and the mixing desk. The look of despair on my face was altogether too clear since I’d gone at the bloody thing with a full bottle of Windolene I’d found in a cupboard, oddly enough unopened.

Ten years of working every hour god sent and suddenly my career depended on a teenage gaming addict who liked to cosplay as a mid-2000s Jay-Z from the neck down and the saddest Good Boy from the neck up. Where had it all gone wrong?

‘It’s going to be fine,’ I told my own face, even though I didn’t look as though I believed me. ‘You’re lucky to have this job. It’s different and new, that’s all. Everything was different and new once, you’ll be fine.’

But a very large part of me was completely over different and new.

Three years ago, I’d jumped at different and new, lost Patrick, left my friends and whole life behind and for what? To end up right back where I’d left off, only now I was alone and I lived in a shed. Everything was confusing and exhausting, I couldn’t get to grips with any of it: how to decide what to watch in the evening, which politicians were the most evil, who had been cancelled and why. What was I allowed to like, what was I allowed to dislike and where was indifference permitted? No, different and new were on my shitlist. I wanted old and familiar. I wanted easy and understandable. I wanted tried and tested, simple and straightforward, comfortable and known and, without thinking, I picked up my phone, opened Patrick’s text and tapped out a reply, hitting send before I could stop myself.

Hello, stranger, his text said.

Hello yourself, I replied.

‘Well, that’s that,’ I whispered, taking a deep breath and watching a single grey tick appear next to the message, followed by a double grey tick. Message delivered.

Three years of stopping myself from contacting him, three years of having to sleep with my phone in the other room every time I came home drunk or went on a rubbish date or experienced even a flicker of yearning. All of it over in an instant. I looked up, expecting to see some flags fly out, a winged pig zooming past overhead, or to at least hear a distant fanfare, but there was nothing. Life-changing moments were supposed to come with a soul-stirring soundtrack, something to acknowledge their gravitas and importance, but all I had was a soundproofed studio-slash-cell, a half-eaten apple and a bag of Mini Cheddars.