It’s your birthday, I told myself, but it’s going to be fine. It’s not an important one. It’s just another day. I was seeing some uni friends for drinks on Saturday; my mum and dad and grandma had sent me cards. My mum had also sent me a skirt from Gap four sizes too big, because she’d remembered they did American sizes you had to either add or subtract two from, and gotten it the wrong way round. I almost told Rachel this, for something else to laugh about, until I remembered I couldn’t.

I set my glass down.

‘Shall we give them one last chance?’ said Rachel.

‘Why not!’ I said, and she went up to order.

My phone had buzzed in my pocket several minutes ago, and I’d been concentrating on not thinking about it. It would be him, I thought. Finally, finally, it would be him – except it wasn’t, of course, it was just my brother.

Happy birthday!! Conall had written, with a picture of him and David grinning, faces smushed together, holding up champagne flutes. 23

You guys! I texted back, with a string of champagne-bottle and heart emojis.

It’s all your fault, Conall messaged back immediately, with a winking face.

It was their anniversary today – they’d got together on my twenty-first, which had been a last-minute, very drunken house party thrown by my then-flatmates, horrified I’d nothing better planned, because unlike people back home, for whom it was all about your eighteenth, English people made a big deal of their twenty-firsts. They’d texted round everyone they could think of who might be free on a random Monday in May, and luckily for Conall, David had been one of those people.

And now here we were, another May Monday, and it could happen, my mum, who suspected something, but didn’t know anything, kept telling me. One of these days, you could just meet the love of your life.

I watched Rachel at the bar, intent on communicating something to the barman, gesticulating at the menu, until he held his hands up and out: I surrender, you win.

He tossed and caught the bottle of spirits on his forearm, poured it into the cocktail shaker from a height, then flipped and spun the shaker, and winked. Rachel shook her head at him and laughed.

I suddenly just wanted to get the rest of the evening over with. As soon as it was done and he hadn’t texted, I’d know for sure he wasn’t going to. 24