Nina and Teddy had met up a few times in London after le Bal, but things seemed different there, a holiday romance transported. Nonetheless, the romance started with promise: terse kisses and hands held, frequent phone calls. He had even visited her at home, his eyes scanning her small terraced house in Mile End earnestly, like a foreign exchange student weighing up their new surroundings. They’d kissed in the bedroom she shared with Carey, her little sister (a half-sister technically, though Nina never thought of her that way) Nina laughing off the soft toys and fairy lights, Teddy grimacing awkwardly, but later that afternoon, on a bench in Tredegar Square, her cold hand on his warm back as they kissed, he suddenly sprang apart: ‘I can’t do this,’ he said. ‘I like you too much.’

She remembered her response. Okay… Please elaborate. She was trying to be stand-offish and aloof, to pretend she didn’t care as much as she did. She’d removed a box of cigarettes from her coat pocket, lit one with shaking fingers and turned her head in the opposite direction to exhale, needing those few seconds to regain her composure.

‘I’m going travelling soon,’ he said. ‘So this can’t work out and… you know… I don’t want our friendship to end when it all goes wrong.’ She felt stung by his assumption that they couldn’t have a relationship long distance, but was too embarrassed to tell him so: a cool girl wouldn’t care, right? A cool girl would be finalising her own plans for the next year.

‘It’s fine,’ she said instead. ‘Don’t worry about it. It was just a casual thing.’ She turned her face again as she smoked so he wouldn’t see the look of distress she wore at how easily he gobbled up her lie and agreed: ‘Yes, that’s what I thought too. Just a casual thing.’ They parted awkwardly at Mile End station. He sent her emails from his gap year – Hello from Koh Samui! Getting out of the outback! – and initially her responses were curt. But by the time he was at university – economics at Exeter – their correspondence had evolved, smelted into something precious, a trail of gold. Now it ebbed and flowed, their banter bouncing off the page, the boundaries jagged – were they friends or something more? When not studying or working, she wrote songs about unrequited love, surrounded by her sister’s Care Bears. She would laugh about this to Teddy during their long phone calls, minus the bit about the unrequited love, although he had asked her what she wrote about and she ad-libbed with, ‘just life, and stuff, you know’. Beside her, she’d scribbled in her notebook: Life in general and love in particular. It was going to be the name of her first album.