It happened a few months before today, in August 2014. Daff and I were both a bit pissed, coming back from the reception on the Tube, and she made some innocuous comment about ‘when we get married …’ And without thinking, I blurted out the truth: I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to.

It seems mad now that we’d never had that conversation before. But even though we’d been going out nearly a decade by then, we were still only twenty-eight. We were still so young.

The argument was all my fault, as usual, because I didn’t explain myself properly. I just grunted and shrugged and said I didn’t really see what the point of getting married was. ‘It’s a waste of money … It’s just a piece of paper’ – all that sort of rubbish. Because the real reason felt too stupid and childish to admit: that ever since my dad left, marriage had been clearly marked as A Bad Thing in my head.

I’d lost count of the times I’d come back from school to find Mum sobbing at the kitchen table, or overheard her crying on the phone to her friends at night, and thought to myself: I’m never getting married.

I guess deep down, I was terrified it would flick some invisible switch inside me. That the minute a ring was on my finger, I would turn into a cheat, just like my dad had.

But of course, I didn’t tell Daff any of that: I thought it would make me sound weird and screwed-up and weak. So instead, I clammed up. I let her think it was about her, rather than me and my parents and my stupid, muddled brain.

Basically, I took her for granted, just like I always do. And then, a month or so later, she told me about New York – how she’d been offered the chance to spend six months working in her agency’s Manhattan office – and suggested that maybe we should use that time to ‘take a break’. Not split up, exactly, but not stay together, either. Just spend some time apart, with no contact, and have a think about what we really wanted.

So that’s what I was supposed to be doing here. Thinking. Not making a mistake that still keeps me awake at night six years later.

But then … was it a mistake? The watch-seller told me to think about why I’m revisiting these particular moments. Over the past couple of years, as things have gone from bad to worse between me and Daphne, I’ve thought about this one a lot. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I’d stayed in Paris, instead of running straight back to London …

With comically perfect timing, the intercom screams out by the door. I sit bolt upright in bed, and my stomach begins to squirm. She’s here.