Not my mum – my calls home were always strictly cheerful and upbeat. Not my friend Karen – she had real problems to deal with; she’d just had a lump in her breast scanned, and was waiting for the results. No: I told the unlikeliest person in the world, other than a complete stranger. The person I chose to confide in was my layabout housemate Sean, who worked in the pub across the road from the salon where I was a junior stylist, and who played the guitar loudly but not well.

Sean had dropped out of a degree at Kingston University to focus on his band, or so he said, though the band had since broken up. He loved music, but what he also loved was the excuse it gave him to sit up late, listening and talking and drinking and smoking, and generally carrying on like someone who had no particular need to get up in the morning.

He was also fond of board games, and he was generous with his whisky. One night I stayed up with him to finish a game of Monopoly. The rest of the house was quiet – everyone else had gone to bed – and it felt so cosy there, in our little rented sitting room with the strange wood cladding on the walls, that I’d just come out with it.

‘Love is strange,’ Sean said. ‘Cupid’s arrow is as good a way to describe it as anything. Once it hits you, it’s likely to stick.’

‘And it hurts,’ I said.

He poured me some more whisky, and a bit later on he tried to kiss me and then stopped.

He said, ‘Is it because you’re still hung up on that other bloke?’

And I let him think it was. It was easier than telling him I wasn’t interested.

‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where I am,’ Sean said, and I went up to bed feeling better than I had ever since Mark had said goodbye.

A week or so after that I found myself in the bathroom of our shared house, staring at a pregnancy test.

Tests, I should say, because there were two in the packet and I used them both, and they both said exactly the same thing. Which was the opposite of what I’d hoped they’d say. But there it was. In blue and white. Twice.

Pregnant.

No way I could have it.

There was a knocking at the bathroom door.

‘Hey! Anybody alive in there?’

It was Sean.

‘Just a minute,’ I said, and stuffed the pregnancy tests back into the box along with the wrapping. I put the box under my jumper and squashed my arm against it to keep it in place, then let myself out.

He was standing outside in an old band T-shirt and boxer shorts, holding a threadbare towel, unshaven and probably hungover as usual. He said, ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah… not too bad.’

I edged away from him to make it plain I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but he didn’t take the hint. He said, ‘Are you around later?’