She glances at my bowl of cereal and sighs. ‘Ben, you haven’t even touched your breakfast. I know that stuff’s not very nice, but we did say we’d do this wedding diet thing together.’ She pushes the bowl across the table towards me. ‘I also think we should go easy on the alcohol today,’ she adds. ‘Just a glass or two of wine. I know it’s Christmas and everything, but if we’re going to start trying straight after the wedding, then we both need to be on it as early as possible, health wise. Becky was saying she and Phil went fully teetotal six months before they even started trying. And they got pregnant after, like, two weeks.’

‘Yeah … OK … Start trying?’ In four months, Alice and I are going to start trying for a baby. I press my fingers gently against my eyelids.

‘Babe, seriously, are you OK?’ she says.

Babe. I don’t remember Alice ever calling me that before. Daff and I used to cringe in unison whenever we heard couples call each other ‘babe’.

Where is she? What the hell happened?

‘Did you actually take those Nurofen?’ Alice says. ‘Because I really want you to be OK today.’ She leans across the table, frowning. ‘Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, maybe don’t say anything today about what you told me last week, OK?’

I shake my head. ‘What did I tell you last week?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘The thing about teaching. About wanting to quit Wyndham’s and retrain as a teacher.’

‘Retrain as a teacher?’ I try to process this statement, but my head is suddenly full of Mum. She always told me I’d make a good teacher. ‘You don’t fancy following in your mother’s footsteps?’ she used to joke. But I was too busy trying to follow in my father’s.

‘I just don’t want you to say anything about it in front of Becky and Phil and everyone,’ Alice says. ‘Not until we’ve talked about it a bit more. I told Becks you’d only leave Wyndham’s if you found something a bit more … you know, lucrative. I mean, teaching’s OK, but it’s not exactly up there on the wow factor, is it? It’s more something you do when you can’t do anything else.’

My throat tightens as I picture Mum: the passion with which she used to talk about her job. She’d come home at the end of every term laden down with bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates, stacks of cards from parents and pupils alike – Thank you so much! Best Teacher Ever! Couldn’t have done it without you!

The cards kept coming long after the pupils had left school – decades after, sometimes. More than one ended with the simple statement: You changed my life.