With nothing else to do, not even the Internet to provide entertainment, we spent the rest of the evening talking, filling in the gaps from the previous few years, asking questions about each other’s past, present, and hopes for the future. While I’d once considered Henry to be easy to talk to because I didn’t care what he thought, I now found that it went deeper than that. As much as prior to this bizarre trip I’d have sworn that Henry Fairfax and I were different in all the ways that mattered, when it came to our values, what lay at the heart of us, we were far more similar than I’d have wanted to admit.

I felt comfortable with Henry because although he set standards for himself that included stopping to help random strangers in a service station, or driving through snow to help out a not-quite-friend, he never once judged me for who I chose to be. I was used to the people close to me being judge, jury, and executioner. Talking with someone who was genuinely interested in why I might disagree with him, who listened with a gentle furrow of intent concentration, rather than interrupting to explain why I was wrong, was a refreshing change.

Had Adam ever listened to me like this? I wondered while boiling some of our precious water reserves for mugs of hot chocolate, determined to keep at least one Armstrong Christmas Eve tradition. With a twist in my stomach, I realised that conversations with Adam had been mainly about Adam. My life, my work, my thoughts had been a sub-plot in the grand biopic of Adam’s future rise to stardom.

The kind of attention I got from Adam made me feel flattered. Henry made me feel interesting.

Not that I was comparing the two, given that I’d been in love with Adam for twelve years, and until this weekend Henry had been the oddball kid from my childhood. I did think – or rather, I hoped – that this Christmas had maybe realigned our relationship to being friends.

I had no intention of ever mentioning him being infatuated with me. However, we were laughing about a bonfire night where the faulty fireworks started shooting indiscriminately across the Charis House playing field, when I accidentally brought it up.

‘Your mum, though!’ I exclaimed. ‘She kept going on about how you’d thrown yourself in front of me to protect me, and how you were my knight in an orange cagoule. I was so irritated because you’d obviously dived out of the firing line without noticing I was standing there.’

Henry looked sideways at me. ‘Given that this happened during the height of my excruciating crush on you, there wasn’t a second of that party I didn’t know exactly where you were standing.’

‘What?’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Are you saying your mum was right?’