We didn’t hug. Even at university Jonathan had never been the hugging type. Honestly, we hadn’t massively got on. On account of him being driven by a passionate desire for success and me being driven by a passionate desire for naps. He was one of those people who had sort of aged laterally, in that he looked almost exactly the same as when he was twenty. He’d somehow picked up a single grey streak in his hair, which gave him a bit of a werewolf vibe—only not in a sexy way—but otherwise he was the same lanky, grumpy git I vaguely remembered.

He stared at me for a long moment. “I have to say, you are the last person I expected to see here.”

“Same. You don’t even like Miles.”

“Since when is I don’t like you an excuse to get out of a wedding?” His mouth, which was a sneery kind of mouth, got sneerier. “I mean, you felt obliged to show up and Miles literally sold you out to the Daily Express. What chance did I have?”

The thing about Jonathan was that he’d occupied a strange position in our friendship group. Someone told me once that the reason Christmas cracker jokes are so bad is that they’re designed to be shared with the whole family and it’s way easier to get everyone to agree that a joke is awful than to get them to agree it’s funny. Jonathan was a human Christmas-cracker joke. We all hated him, and we were pretty sure he hated us, but somehow that brought us together. Unfortunately, without that context he was just a mildly unpleasant man. Then again, so was I.

“Anyway”—I gave a sickly smile—“this is Oliver Blackwood, my boyfriend. Oliver, this is Jonathan…” Aaaand I couldn’t remember his surname. “This is Jonathan, who I knew at university, but we didn’t like each other.”

“Good to know you’re still a cock, Luc,” said Jonathan.

Strangely more in his element now I was asking him to be polite to an arsehole in a suit, Oliver offered his hand. “Lovely to meet you. If it helps, Luc didn’t like me either.”

“I like you now,” I protested.

Oliver laughed. “I should bloody well hope so. It’s been two years.”

“So…” Jonathan had always had the eyebrows of an angry cartoon character, and now they knitted together ominously. “What didn’t he like about you?”

“He thought I was boring.”

“Me too,” said Jonathan.

“Oliver, I didn’t,” I lied. “I just thought you were…you know, overachieving and a bit serious.” And too good for me, but I was fucked if I was admitting that in front of Jonathan.

“Being overachieving and serious are very underrated qualities.” You could never tell if Jonathan was joking. He delivered everything in the same unplaceably accented monotone.