Once I’m outside in the freezing fresh air, I pull the iPhone 13 out of my pocket and scroll through the address book.

Before I can get to Harv, though, I find Daphne.

Chapter Forty-Two

It’s the same number.

I tap on the thumbnail-sized profile picture next to her name to enlarge it. My stomach drops when I realise it shows two people, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders in front of a beach sunset. I recognise Daff instantly from her curly black hair, but the photo has been taken from so far away that I can’t make out the man’s face under his sun hat.

It is definitely a man, though.

She’s with someone new. She might even be married to him.

Heart thumping, I go into my messages and scroll down to see that my last contact with her was in June 2022 – a year and a half ago. I’d sent a long, slightly desperate-sounding text full of questions – How are you? How’s the job going? Hope your mum and dad are well? – and Daff had replied with one short, simple sentence: Yeah, all OK, thanks – hope you are too.

Scrolling further back, I can see that I’d fired off two similar messages four and five months before the last one. Daphne hadn’t even replied to those.

I stare out at the unfamiliar street in front of me. My life has turned upside down. I’m now hiding away messages from Daff, hoping that Alice won’t find them.

Not that there’s anything to hide: Daphne clearly has no desire to see me or hear from me. The realisation hits me with a dull thud. There’s no second chance: I have lost her. I try to hold on to Harv’s advice about my inner optimist, but the words seem meaningless now. I can’t imagine my life without her in it.

My thumb hovers over her profile picture. I’m desperate to speak to her, to find out what happened between us – when and how and why we broke up. But the blurry face of that man beside her stops me from making the call. Am I really going to be able to cope with the answers to these questions?

I hear the front door open behind me. ‘Ben? Seriously? I said I needed you!’

Over the next two hours, I shadow Alice around the flat like a robot butler, assisting her clumsily with the icing of cakes, chilling of cava and plumping of cushions. In a weird way, it’s actually nice to be bossed about – to not have to think for myself – as it stops my brain constantly spinning back to Daphne. That said, as half eleven approaches, a new kind of panic starts to creep in.