‘I don’t know.’ For a second, she can’t quite meet my eye, and it’s like the eighteen-year-old Alice is back – all self-conscious and guarded. ‘Maybe I do want those things,’ she adds, ‘if I find the right person. But it’s not my priority at the moment. There are other things I want to do first.’ She ashes her cigarette and turns to me. ‘What about you? Do you want kids and stuff?’

‘I thought I did,’ I say. ‘But now … I’m not sure.’

Daff and I were actually going to start trying for kids a few years back. It was soon after we got married, just after she turned thirty. Even though my career was still stop-starting, it seemed like the right time. And back then, it was something we both definitely wanted. We would text each other horrifying Face Swap mash-ups of ourselves accompanied by This is what our kids will look like haha messages. We even sketched out a date that Daff might come off the pill.

But then … Well, then Mum died and everything went dark. And the conversation never properly reignited after that, despite the fact that all our mates seemed to be starting families around us.

It became this weird unspoken thing between us. We’d go and visit friends with their new babies, and even though I oohed and aahed in all the right places, I honestly felt … nothing. Which was scary, because I used to genuinely love the idea of being a dad. I would even experience something close to broodiness whenever I passed a smiling young couple swinging a toddler between them in the park. It would send me spiralling straight into a daydream about Daff and me doing the same thing. But after Mum died, it was like something fused inside me. There didn’t seem to be any point to anything any more. All sense of excitement about the future just fizzled and burned out. I’d suddenly realised that the people you loved could just get torn away from you, at any moment, for no reason at all.

The worst thing was that Daff and I never talked about it. I could tell she didn’t want to pressure me – that she knew how much Mum’s death had messed me up. As the months dragged on though, I worried she was starting to resent me. That she wanted to find someone else, someone she could actually build a future with, but that she would feel too bad about leaving me. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, it would occur to me that she might never have children because she’d wasted her thirties with me.

That was the worst feeling in the world.