Part of me couldn’t believe we were even talking about next time.

He winked. ‘If you insist, I won’t object.’

I shouldn’t have been worried about the evening being weird or not having anything to chat about because there wasn’t one moment of awkwardness. The conversation flowed as we talked about everything under the sun. Normal things like favourite music and movies—Dan favoured jazz whereas I was a bit of an eighties tragic, and he preferred horror movies and I didn’t think anything could beat a good romantic comedy—and much more personal things, such as our relationships and failed marriages.

‘Why’d you guys break up?’ Dan asked, after we’d shared stories of how we’d met our spouses. Dan’s wife Tessa was the younger sister of one of his mates from boarding school.

I took a sip of wine and sighed. ‘Adrian told me he didn’t find me attractive anymore, that he wanted to play the field.’

‘He sounds like a dick,’ Dan said. ‘And a stupid one at that. The man must be blind.’

A warmth flushed through me and I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Thank you. That’s kind of you to say, but it doesn’t stop me feeling like a failure. And I feel stupid too, because everything I thought about our marriage was clearly a lie. You think you know someone … It was a big shock to discover I was living with a stranger.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Dan topped up my wine.

Maybe it was the alcohol making us both loose-lipped or maybe it was simply talking to someone who had been through a separation, but in that moment, I felt as if I could tell him anything.

Maybe Dan could be my divorce guru!

‘What about you?’ I asked finally. ‘Why did your marriage end?’

He confessed that Tessa had left him after five failed IVF attempts.

‘We wanted a big family—it’s why we built this place—and she decided if my sperm couldn’t fertilise her eggs, then rather than consider a donor, she’d find someone whose could. She already has two kids with her new husband. The perfect pigeon pair,’ he joked, but I could hear the raw pain in his voice as he spoke about how fraught things had grown between them in their last year of marriage. ‘When Tessa and I found out I couldn’t have kids, she totally changed. She quickly grew to resent me, and at a time when we should have been supporting each other, we started to argue over tiny things. Although if our relationship wasn’t strong enough to survive infertility, then maybe it was for the best.’