It takes me over an hour to calm down sufficiently to fully follow the conversation. I order garlic king prawns and chili mayonnaise chicken wings, busying myself with the food and the wine while my friends chatter, the volume steadily increasing with each unit of alcohol. After three glasses of cava, I feel more like myself again. Jenny regales us with one hilarious story after another of her adventures on Tinder – she’s the only singleton in our group of friends, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s the one having the most fun. Carla moans about the relentless pressures of motherhood, and feels that being a stay-at-home mom to her fourteen-month-old twins is a lot harder than her previous high-flying job in management consulting. I just want to sit on the toilet for five fucking minutes by myself, she says, taking another greedy glug from her cava. Our eyes meet and I sense a quick apology in the way she looks at me – my friends all feel awkward discussing their children around me. They stopped asking about IVF and how it’s all going a long time ago, and I’m glad they did.

‘So how’s that handsome man of yours?’ asks Simone, our impossibly glamorous onetime French-exchange student who ended up staying in Oslo and married Arne, a friend of Eirik’s.

‘Away, as usual,’ I say. ‘After the elections, things will presumably calm down. We’ll need to get a date in the diary and have you all over for dinner sometime soon. It’s been ages.’

Everyone concurs, it has been ages. Over the past year, I’ve hardly seen my friends at all; Eirik’s increasingly demanding career, as well as my own, combined with Elisabeth’s tragic death and my own therapy work have all added up to a very busy day-to-day life. It feels unexpectedly good to sit here with my friends, drinking wine as the afternoon darkens into evening, listening to their loud, tipsy laughter, just letting myself grow fully relaxed and mellow, emptying my mind of all the stress and tension.

On my way home, I find myself giggling to myself – it’s as though the seven-hour brunch replenished my energy reserves, though I’m sure I’ll be sorry tomorrow. I try to call Eirik, I want to hear his deep, soothing voice and tell him I love him, but it goes straight to voicemail. He’s probably at some boring dinner, listening to boring speeches by boring people. I giggle again and leave him a voice message on WhatsApp saying I wish he could be waiting for me at home, in bed.