I had an email saved in my Drafts folder, written to my future self. I’d written it last Christmas Eve – or, I supposed, technically, Christmas Day. He had promised that after Christmas he was going to tell her everything, and end it. He just wanted to get Christmas over with first. They’d flown back to Wrocław on the twenty-first, and the following day I’d come to Belfast, and although it was just four days, or really only three, that I hadn’t heard from him, those flights, that distance, made everything seem far longer.

In Poland, it was all about Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve afternoon, you decorated your Christmas tree, and 28when you saw Gwiazdka, the little star, the first star of evening, you lit the tree’s lights and Christmas had begun. Then you sat down with your extended family to a meal with twelve dishes, the centrepiece a whole carp. After dinner, you exchanged gifts, and went to midnight Mass. The next day, Christmas Day, was a public holiday, but there was nothing particularly special about it: it was more like our Boxing Day.

It had always been about Christmas Eve for me too – about the build-up, the anticipation, the house full of secrets, the drawing-in – and I was sure that he’d find a moment to write to me, Happy Christmas Eve, even if that was all it said. I looked up the time of sunset in Wrocław: twilight began at twelve minutes to four, which is when his nieces and nephews would be clamouring to spot the star, and be the one to announce that Christmas had begun, and I knew that’s when he’d write.

I’d been into the city centre that morning, the last-minute messages my mother needed, posh cheese and biscuits for the neighbours coming round, extra rolls of wrapping paper. It was nothing I couldn’t have got on the local high street, but I loved the almost-empty bus into town then walking the Christmas Eve streets, the knot of goths in front of the City Hall refusing to concede to the festive season, the cigarette-lighter men of my childhood, now that people hadn’t the need of five lighters for a pound, selling flashing Santa hats and antlers and bristling strings of tinsel instead. The birch trees on Donegall Place, slender and bare, drawn up in the clear air, waiting. Into Corn Market, where the 29bandstand used to be, and the ravaged old man with his megaphone and placards, impossible to tell if the end he was proclaiming was nigh or now. The sky that Christmas Eve morning was pale, the hills iron-grey with cold, the city ingathered. Seagulls in from the lough, wheeling in circles, landing on lamp-posts and folding and unfolding their disdainful wings, the sense that despite themselves they were restlessly waiting too.