‘I wish I could but it would be at least …’ I looked down at my watch. It was after seven now and we clearly wouldn’t be done here any time soon. I’d have to go home, pick up some clean knickers, give myself a Vegas shower with a bunch of baby wipes and then scoot back across London. ‘I think at least nine by the time I could get to you? Maybe even nine thirty?’

‘Then I’ll just suffer without you,’ he lamented. ‘I was just sat here, thinking about the first time we met.’

‘Oh?’ I replied, my body prickling to attention. I remembered the night with violent clarity.

‘I remember walking into that party with my editor and all I wanted to do was turn around and walk out again,’ Patrick said. His voice was rich and warm and heavy and I could taste him as he spoke.

‘And I nearly didn’t go in the first place,’ I replied, my pulse quickening as my voice lowered. I heard liquid being poured into a glass. ‘The Mapplethorpes’ annual Christmas tree trimming. Mum bullied me into going.’

‘I walked in and saw you and I couldn’t believe my luck.’ He took a sip of something and the sound of it sent tingles sparking all along my scalp. ‘This gorgeous creature, all those wild brown curls and big eyes, just boring into me.’

Someone nearby was calling out scores for a tennis game but I was somewhere else entirely. A warm living room in East Mosely, the smell of homemade mince pies in the air mixed with a freshly cut Christmas tree and too many middle-aged women wearing the same Estée Lauder perfumes. I’d actually had my hair up that night but I wasn’t about to spoil his fantasy with pedantic facts. It had certainly been down by the end of it.

‘And you were wearing a white shirt and grey trousers,’ I said quietly. ‘And you were laughing about something then I caught your eye and you came over to say hello.’

‘What did we even talk about?’ Patrick asked. I imagined him lying on his bed, holding his whisky glass, loosening his top button. ‘I can’t remember.’

We talked about books we’d both read, the books he had written, we talked about the places he travelled to, the places I wanted to travel to, we talked about my job, we talked about the sad state of modern Christmas number ones, we talked about homemade versus shop-bought Christmas cakes, we talked about the importance of Fleetwood Mac and my unpopular opinion that Tango in the Night was better than Rumours and we talked about how his editor was friends with the Mapplethorpes but didn’t know my parents, how I was there out of daughterly duty, how he was there to meet some journalist who hadn’t turned up and maybe that was all just meant to be.