‘Imogen! Sorry, I know, I’ve just been a bit…’ she exhales. ‘I’ve had an awful day. Well, not awful at all, really, that’s the problem. Just…I suppose it’s hitting me that this is my life now. I’m stuck here, and I miss you.’

‘No, no, you’re not stuck, you’re just,’ panicking, I reach for something—anything—that might comfort her. ‘You’re assessing your options. You won’t be there for ever, you’ll figure out a plan.’

‘I wish you’d come back with me.’

‘Well, I’d do it if I could live at yours. Do you think Su would adopt me? Can you be legally adopted, at twenty-six?’

‘Mum would sign the papers in half a heartbeat, you know that. But if you lived in this house, you too would be drowning in teacher training brochures. You’d be getting them on toast. You’d go to wipe your bum and instead of tissue, you’d find a course syllabus. I’m expecting to wake up and discover that Mum has papered my room with them in the night. Anyway—oh my God, new job! I’m really proud of you!’

In most people’s mouths, that phrase makes me bristle. Dad is—Mum claims—proud. Strangers on the internet are ‘so proud of u, hun’ when I’m ‘brave’ and share sex toy reviews and unfiltered accounts of my quest for multiple orgasms. Whenever I go on Facebook, Leanne Patterson, who once stamped on my foot so hard that she broke my little toe, is posting and boasting about her pride, because her old ‘bff’ (HA!) appears to be doing so well.

If any of these people have earned a whisper of a right to pride, it’s because their cruelty, their obstructiveness, their lack of faith forced me to double down. I might have given up, had they not made it clear that was exactly what they wanted.

I don’t really know how to say what I’m feeling. That I need Jen to celebrate me. This opportunity is so hard won. Jen knows better than anyone about the grinding anxiety, the night shifts, the sketchy bars, the factories, the unpaid hours in fashion cupboards all over Soho and Mayfair. Because Jen has lived it too. And I know she has wanted this just as much as me. It’s only luck and circumstance that means that I’m still in London—just—and she’s down in Devon.

I try. ‘I’ve been missing you so much, today. You’re the only one who gets it. Mum basically told me to come home when it inevitably goes to shit—because everything she’s ever known has gone to shit. Not that I ever could. Even Sam Strong hardly reacted—you’d think he’d have some professional curiosity.’