‘Don’t laugh but I thought it would be nice if you and Jo wore the same thing,’ Mum said, busily rearranging my flowers. ‘Since you’re going to be my bridesmaids.’

Oh god, I’d forgotten. An adult bridesmaid wearing the same dress as my gorgeous younger sister, for my mid-sexual-renaissance, sixty-year-old mother. Maybe Patrick hadn’t sent the flowers, maybe the universe sent them as a preemptive apology. Jo was not going to like this at all.

‘Does Saturday work?’ I asked, staring at my dahlias and channelling their grace.

‘Saturday is wonderful,’ she hopped up to her feet. ‘I’ll see if I can book us a table somewhere nice for lunch, we can make a day of it.’

‘Perfect,’ I said, pulling the covers back up over my face. ‘Is Jo coming?’

‘I think Jo might be too busy to come back from Cambridge for the day,’ Mum said, not-so-discreetly running a fingertip along the windowsill. ‘So you get the deciding vote on your dresses. And I did think it might be nice if you wanted to help us plan the actual shindig, I haven’t organized a party since you were nine.’

A sudden flashback to my dad accidentally waterboarding Adrian when we were supposed to be bobbing for apples.

‘I’d love to, Mum,’ I told her. ‘It’ll be perfect, I promise.’

‘And you never know,’ she gave my flowers a knowing look. ‘Could be good practice for your own wedding.’

‘All right, enough’s enough,’ I said, waving her out the door. Not that I hadn’t already worked this very bouquet into my wedding speech already but still. ‘Please lock it on your way out.’

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ Mum laughed as she let herself out. ‘Oh, and Rosalind, please tidy up in here before you leave for work, it’s a disgrace.’

I knew she wouldn’t be able to help herself.

It took me all the way to work, two very large coffees and a forty-five-minute deliberation in the group text before I decided how to reply to Patrick’s flowers. Eventually I got two-thirds approval to say ‘Thank you for the flowers, they’re beautiful.’ Simple, honest and safe. Sumi was the holdout and lobbied hard for ‘Stick them up your arse’ but our official friend group rules said you only needed a two-thirds majority approval to send a text. Had it been a photo, things might have been different but it wasn’t so she was outvoted.

‘I just don’t trust him,’ she yelled down the phone after the text had been sent. ‘One bunch of flowers does not a decent human make. It’s every arsehole’s go-to move.’

‘So sending flowers is worse than not sending flowers?’

I was never going to win. Patrick could reveal he was the second coming of Christ and Sumi would still say he was trying too hard.