‘Are you breaking up with me?’ he asked solemnly.

‘I guess I am,’ I said, my eyes full of tears. It was the last thing I wanted in my heart.

He left.

He tried to contact me a few times after that, but I ignored his texts and calls. I pushed him away because it seemed the best option for us both. After a few weeks the calls stopped. I suppose his young ego prevented him from chasing me too hard. We were only 19 after all – there would be plenty more Miss Rights out there for a guy like him.

How I wish I could turn back time.

I went back to uni a month after the abortion, but I couldn’t cope. I was unable to simply move on, it was too painful. And my ex couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to be ‘just friends’. Instead of finding the strength to return his calls, I became more isolated and drifted further away from my social group. I even found it hard to be around Katie because she was the only person who knew my secret, and neither of us were equipped for the level of ‘adulting’ the associated emotions required. I couldn’t blame her for that; I was naïve too. She tried to be there for me, but I found it hard to understand my own mind until a long time later. As the days passed, it felt more and more impossible to ever explain to anyone why I was feeling so low.

So, after a few weeks, I dropped out and moved back home to London. It was easier to just disappear and move on without explanation. ‘Ghosting’, they call it now. I didn’t even say goodbye to my tutors or all of my friends. Only Katie knew the real reason and although she begged me to think again, I had already made up my mind. The pain of what had happened felt too much to bear. It had been relatively straightforward to cut ties back then, before social media had really taken hold and we became used to recording our daily life. And there was no one I would miss more than him. At the start of the next academic year, I enrolled on a marketing communications degree in London.

As the years passed, no Mr Right came along for me; no matter how hard I looked, no man lived up to my first true love. He invaded my dreams and infiltrated my thoughts almost every day. The pain of terminating a baby made with a person I loved so much didn’t dull as the years passed.

It’s a decision I always regretted; always wondered: ‘what if I’d told him I was pregnant? Would things have turned out differently?’ For years I toyed with finally sharing with him the secret I’d been cradling for so long, but he had blocked my phone number when we split up. I hadn’t found any way to contact him since.