It had been OK but hadn’t felt right. I missed the pandemonium that had become part of my life. After we’d split up five years ago, I’d made a new condition to my relationships, and that was ‘love me, love my friends.’ Trouble was, there hadn’t been anyone since to try the condition out on. I wondered where Richard was spending his Christmas this year. In fact, I’d been thinking a lot about all my past partners since India, reviewing who they were, who I was at the time, and asking myself if there was one who had got away. I hadn’t been thinking of them because I believed that I’d known any of them in a past life, but what Saranya Ji had said had got me thinking about the choices I’d made to get where I was today, and if there was anything I could learn from the past in order to go forward.

*

Richard Benson. I’d met him over ten years ago when he’d come into the shop in Hampstead, on one of the rare days when I was behind the counter and not up in my office on the floor above.

I’d heard the door open and looked up to see a tall, well-dressed man in his fifties coming in.

‘I’m looking for a gift for my niece,’ he’d said in a public school voice as he perused the counters and cabinets displaying jewellery. ‘It’s her twenty-first and I don’t want to go the usual Tiffany route, I’d like to give her something more personal.’

Hmm, a thoughtful man, I noted. ‘Any ideas so far?’ I asked.

‘Her name is Rose, maybe a chain with an “R” on it?’ he suggested as he pointed at a display of alphabet letter charms in gold and silver.

‘Oh no, they’re popular with the teenagers but maybe not for a twenty-first. Rose you say? How about something like this?’

I drew a quick sketch showing a bracelet with slim linked leaves with one charm on it, that being a single rosebud. ‘Far more subtle and unusual than an R,’ I told him. ‘Be lovely in silver. What do you think?’

He smiled. ‘Delightful. How clever of you just to draw it like that. It’s just the thing. Could you do it in time? The birthday’s in a few weeks.’

‘I’m sure we could,’ I said. I had a few contacts in the area who could make up a design for me.

He had returned to the shop to pick up the bracelet, then again a month later to tell me that the gift had been a great success and to ask if I’d like to go for dinner. I said yes.