I gave her a drunken pat. “I think it was. I just think we didn’t notice. Which”—I cast my mind back a decade—“might explain why we made so many terrible, terrible mistakes.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Priya. “I stand by every mistake I’ve ever made.”

For a while we passed around the dregs of the wine and commiserated. We didn’t have any real answers for each other—not about the Oliver situation or about the wedding situation or about the why-is-everything-so-hard-suddenly situation. But there was a comfort in knowing that, in the tiny space of my flat at least, we were all in the same boat. That we were all in an equally bemused state of making shit up as we went along and then throwing it at the wall to see if it stuck. Which was probably a mixed metaphor, but fuck it, I’d been drinking.

“So how is marriage?” I asked Bridge eventually, mostly because once we’d decided that we weren’t doing a highly irresponsible overnight and over-the-legal-limit drive to Milton Keynes to save a relationship that might not even need saving, she’d started looking almost as down as I felt.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” she said. She didn’t have wonderful face. “But…”

For a while we waited for her to continue. When it became clear she wasn’t, Priya asked, “Wonderful but what?”

“Perhaps she was just bragging that Tom has a wonderful butt?” I suggested in a vain attempt to lighten the mood. “Which to be fair, he does.”

Bridge nodded, slightly less glum than ninety seconds ago. “He does, and it is. I mean, married life, not Tom’s arse. I mean, also Tom’s arse. It’s just…the wedding was so magical and the honeymoon was so so magical but then we got back and it was, well, carrying on as normal.”

“Aren’t you buying a house together?” I asked. “That’s pretty fresh-starty.”

“In theory, but I work full time and he works full time and the market is a mess and there are chains and things so we can’t even put a deposit down until my little flat sells and we’ve had two buyers drop out already and…” She sighed. “It’s so fiddly. Who decided that being happy forever with the person you love most in the universe had to be fiddly?”

Sometimes I thought Bridge’s die-hard romanticism in the face of my self-obsession was a deliberate strategy to draw me out of myself, and most of the time it worked. “To be fair,” I said, “when you put it that way, it actually sounds like a decent trade.”

“Apart from the loving-somebody-more-than-anybody-else-in-the-world part,” added Priya. “That bit can go fuck itself.”

Bridget’s eyes widened. “But what’s the point if—”