Probably I should have gone after him. Except, no, probably I shouldn’t because part of being a grown-up in a grown-up relationship was trusting the other person. And so, although an irrational voice in the back of my head was telling me, If you don’t go and find him immediately, he’ll realise you’re shit and dump you, I somehow managed to believe more in the two years we’d spent together than the jagged mess of damage that normally dominated my decision making.

Grabbing one of the many glasses of free champagne, I tried to look like an absolutely fine person who was having a nice time at a wedding and happened, just incidentally, to be standing on his own at the moment. Definitely not someone who’d had no sleep and a massive argument with his boyfri—fuck. Fiancé.

I stuck it out for about an honourable ten minutes before deciding I’d made a big enough sacrifice to the maturity gods and could go be needy again.

Unfortunately, the process of finding Oliver involved looking for him, which involved not quite looking where I was going, which meant narrowly avoiding colliding with a guest and narrowly not avoiding sloshing my champagne over him.

I got as far as “Oh shit, sorr—” before Justice Mayhew turned like a stop-motion Medusa and glared at me.

“What,” he roared, “the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

Of all the high-court judges in all the weddings in all the world, I’d walked into him. “I’m really sor—”

“Not good enough. You’re being paid to do a job. Do it properly.”

In the one and a half seconds it took me to realise that of course he’d assumed I was part of the catering staff, he decided I’d had enough time to reply and carried on.

“Well? Don’t just stand there gawping. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I said I was sorry,” I protested.

Justice Mayhew was still glaring at me. “And I said sorry wasn’t good enough. That’s the trouble with your generation. Don’t listen, don’t think, don’t care about anything but yourselves.”

“I was looking for my boyfriend…” I knew the moment I’d said it that it was precisely the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, I see how it is.” He folded his arms defiantly. “You think that because you’re some sort of protected minority that you can’t be held accountable for your failure to do your bloody job. Well, I’ve got news for you, sonny lad. That isn’t the way it works. I know you people think you’re entitled to a free ride because you can just run crying to the Equality and Human Rights Commission and they’ll make all your problems go away. Well, I’m afraid in the real world—”