‘I finish at two! We can spend the evening at home and Mum and Dad are expecting us for dinner on Boxing Day.’

‘Dinner with your parents? You’re not making this decision any harder for me.’

‘What if I came down to see you?’

‘Look, I’m sorry. We’ll be rehearsing non-stop. Twig has offered us his parents’ place in Kent for the week. You know what it’s like. I can’t think about anything other than the music when I’m rehearsing.’

‘I’m not sure it’s any different when you aren’t rehearsing.’

Ugh. I hated sounding like the sulky girlfriend, but Adam had promised, multiple times, that he would definitely be coming up on Christmas Eve, which was tomorrow. I’d asked him over and over in the past few weeks, until he’d got angry and started ranting about trust issues. Since he’d moved back to London in January I’d seen him five times, four of them when I’d gone to visit him. This Christmas trip was to make up for cancelling all the other times he’d promised to come up to stay. One of them he’d only phoned when I’d already stood waiting at Nottingham station. Apparently he’d lost track of time in the studio and they’d been on the brink of finishing a new single; he could hardly have got up and walked out then.

‘Come on, love. We agreed that taking this last shot was too good to miss. That means I have to be where the band needs me.’

‘We said we’d give it a year.’

There was a hard silence.

‘Yes, but you can’t expect me to pull out now, when we’re so close. Honestly, Bea, I can feel it this time.’

Adam had ‘felt it’ so many times before I’d lost count.

‘That last show, with the exec watching, it was magic. We’re finally finding our sound, making music that really means something…’

He went on, babbling about how this was surely the break they’d been waiting for, how our dreams were about to come true. I didn’t bother correcting him that these were his dreams, not mine.

I finally interrupted with a weary, half-hearted question about when he could come instead.

‘Ah, that’s hard to say. If we get spotted, things could happen fast. I don’t want to let you down again. I’ll be in touch after the gig, let you know what’s happening.’

‘Right. Well. Happy Christmas. I hope it goes well.’ That wasn’t a complete lie. I knew how much this meant to him.