She carries on. ‘I love him so much for that. I always will. But I just wasn’t ever… in love with him, no matter how hard I tried to be. It feels horrible to say that, but it’s true. And when he proposed, I thought…’ She breaks off. I imagine her shaking her head, staring down at the floor. ‘I don’t know what I thought, really. That I didn’t want to hurt him by saying no? That maybe I would grow to fall in love with him. That my mum would be off-her-nut delighted, and it’s not often I get the chance to make her feel like that. Maybe even because all my friends were getting married and having kids, and I didn’t want to be left behind. Pathetic to admit it, but there it is.’

‘It’s not pathetic at all. I get it. So, what caused you to break it off?’

Another direct question. I’m a maverick. A rebel! I’m the James Dean of telephone crisis lines.

‘Well, Dom kept saying, “We should get a date in the diary”, “We should start looking at venues”, and I just kept telling him, “Ah, there’s no rush, let’s take it slowly”. Then, one evening, I came home from work early and he’d left his laptop open on the kitchen table. There was this Word document on there – five pages long… It was his speech for the wedding. We didn’t even have a date set and he’d already written his speech. And it was so… so lovely.’ Her voice quivers and breaks on the word. She takes a shaky breath. ‘He deserves someone who feels the same way. And seeing that speech made me realise: this is real. This will be the rest of our lives, unless I do something to stop it. And then he came downstairs, and I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry him. And his face just…’

She is crying now – little gulps between each word. My neck feels hot suddenly, and I notice that I’m twisting the phone cord so tightly my knuckles are white. ‘He didn’t deserve that,’ she whispers. ‘He didn’t deserve what I did to him. I just feel like such an awful person.’

‘But you can’t…’ My voice comes out croaky, and I swallow hard and start again. ‘Pia, if it wasn’t meant to be, then he will thank you in the long run. You have to remember that.’