And what about my house, which I loved? And my garden, which I actually might have loved even more? When I’d first moved in, five years ago, I was still in shock that Luke and I were over and had no interest in making a home. Functional was all that had mattered—a bed to collapse into, a couch to slump on, a microwave to make popcorn when I remembered to eat.

The furniture that Luke and I had owned in New York had gone to Goodwill. I’d arrived back in Ireland with very little money, so only the barest essentials were purchased.

But time really is a healer—because one day I’d found myself shelling out an unholy sum of money for a sixties-style dressing table. From Ebay! I hadn’t even seen it in real life, but some certainty was humming in me that it would work—and it did.

It must have been around then that Claire and I took to haunting a second-hand furniture market, because Claire’s best frenemy had come by a fabulous low-slung Mad Men-esque coffee table there. But Claire found the scratched wood and torn upholstery of the market repellent. ‘Life’s too short to see potential in something. Give me the completed article, don’t waste my time.’

But I was all about the potential. The day I found two battered but deliciously angular mid-century armchairs at a stall, I immediately asked the price. Claire said, genuinely confused, ‘What d’you want them for? Mulch for your’—she threw a snigger into the word—‘ “shrubs”?’ (Her garden was gorgeous because she paid a lot of money to a landscaper and his team of skilled Slovakians. She had never picked up so much as a trowel and my little hobby baffled her.)

Feeling thrillingly directional, I’d had the chairs reupholstered and now they occupied pride of place in my ‘study’.

‘You’d better not become one of those smug fuckers,’ Claire had warned. ‘With their one-off “pieces”.’

It was an identity I’d have been delighted to embrace but, to date, the chairs remained my biggest success.

‘I love my house,’ I said.

‘It’s great—if it was just the two of us. But the kids need their space.’

‘I know.’

‘We can dig up your cherry blossom and replant it here.’

But there was another reason I was resistant: the terrible way Luke and I had ended. ‘Quin, if things went sideways for us…’ I tried to find the words. ‘And I had to leave…’

‘Things won’t go sideways.’

I could have laughed. It didn’t take him long to snap back to his cocky, confident self.

‘Even if they did,’ he said, ‘you’d be okay. You’ve survived a lot, you’re able.’

He was right, I saw, slightly surprised.