There was a hidden river running the length of High Street that once you knew about you couldn’t help but feel underfoot, the eastward tug of it, and I always ended my walk by following its path past the Albert Clock and into Custom House Square, where its culverts met the Lagan. But before looping back on myself and heading for the bus stop home, I’d paused to listen to a group of carol singers outside the Mayfair Buildings, and as they sang the first tremulous lines of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, the feeling of everything just about to happen built and built until I almost couldn’t bear it any longer.

He’d never been to Belfast – not properly, at least. He’d flown in to do the Game of Thrones tour on a mate’s stag do, and it had rained. He’d told me that, rolling his eyes and laughing, and although I’d usually be the first to criticise the place, how provincial it could be, how I couldn’t wait to get away, I’d felt it like a punch to the gut.

Belfast didn’t feel like mine exactly, any more, now I’d been gone so many years – I couldn’t have told you where the best bars were, and the bus routes had all changed – but it still felt like a part of me: and how badly I wanted him, 30then, not in an abstract sense, or in some nebulous future, but right there beside me, Corn Market, Christmas Eve. I wanted him to see the city, to walk its streets with me, and I thought: I have to tell you this.

As the carol singers paused to shuffle their sheets, I took out my phone and wrote the beginnings of a haphazard, tumbling email that I’d continue all day, on the bus back home, in front of the fire and my family’s traditional It’s A Wonderful Life, as twelve minutes to four came and went, and on into the evening as Conall and David bickered in jest over how best to make Irish coffees, then later on in my single bed, my old childhood stocking hung on the doorknob. But as the night crept on and I didn’t hear from him, didn’t hear from him, I held back from sending it. As Christmas Eve tipped into Christmas Day, 00.00, 00.01, I wrote, instead, to myself; a message to be read when the moment finally came, when I needed it most, or could pretend no longer.

It was kind of a relief to think I hadn’t got there yet, and also just exhausting.

‘So I think you might be ready,’ said Rachel. ‘Do you want to hear my theory?’