My blood turns to ice.

I glance down at my left hand to see that my wedding ring has disappeared.

I am getting married to Alice. I am no longer married to Daphne and I am getting married to Alice.

The kitchen door swings opens and she comes back in, humming under her breath. ‘OK, presents are done … I need to ice the cake, and get the wine out. What are you going to wear, by the way, babe? Why don’t you wear that shirt I like …’

She tails off as she finally looks over at me.

‘Ben, what are you doing?’ she says sharply. ‘Why are you looking at the calendar?’

‘I just … I was … The wedding planner?’

I’ve been in the future for half an hour now, and I’m still yet to form a coherent sentence.

Alice’s face falls and she puts a hand to her forehead. ‘Ben, you are kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding. I told you about that appointment three days ago.’ She shakes her head irritably. ‘You probably just zoned out as usual, didn’t you? God, you’ve been so out of it lately. I feel like I’m doing everything myself. Which is fine, obviously, as I don’t think you’d be much use anyway.’ She laughs to herself at this, and then whirs back into activity, pulling tin foil out of the cupboard and a large cake out of the fridge.

I get the sense that I am not really needed in this conversation – that Alice probably spends a lot of time talking at me, rather than to me.

‘The wedding’s only four months away, Ben,’ she’s saying. ‘I really need you to engage a bit more, OK?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ I mumble.

Four months. In four months, I am marrying Alice.

She carries on. ‘So, like I told you, this appointment is to talk about the flowers and the readings. And also the string quartet.’

I stare at her. ‘The … string quartet?’

‘Yes, the string quartet. I did tell you about that, too.’ Her mouth curls up slightly at the side. ‘It’s funny, actually, Becks is going to be so pissed off that we’ve managed to book them. She wanted them for their wedding, but they couldn’t do that date. She’ll be fuming.’ There’s a gleeful snarkiness creeping into her voice: the same tone she used in Paris when she was slagging off her colleagues.