‘I know, and I’m so lucky, but sometimes I fantasise about a life where it’s just me in a silent flat and no one to clean up after but myself.’ I lose her momentarily to the fantasy. ‘I’m just saying, it’s nice to take a look at your life every so often, isn’t it? Shake it up, try something new. Like next week, we’ll try a different café for lunch.’

‘Shhh, don’t let Sue hear you.’

Layla laughs.

‘I love that you wrote to yourself. What a great idea. Did you do it again?’

‘I did, quite a few times that summer, if I remember rightly. It’s all a bit hazy because time passed so differently then. I was only there for about twelve weeks, but it felt like I fitted a year’s worth of living in each one.’

‘Wow, so this is the first of many?’

‘Uh-huh, I’m just waiting for the next one to arrive.’

Layla sips at her drink, leaving a layer of foam on her lips. I gesture to it and she brushes it away.

‘Do you keep in touch with any of those friends?’

‘Not really. Soph and Douglas tried to at first, after I left when Mum—’ The word gets stuck in my throat because I so rarely tell the story.

‘It was that year that she died?’ She tilts her head, and her face softens.

‘Yeah, it was a few days before I was due to leave. Soph did come to visit me a couple of times after that and she’d send me Christmas cards, but our lives were just so different, what with me working and she at university. It sounds petty, but it hurt to keep in touch with her and Douglas because they were living the life I wanted to and couldn’t have.’

Layla reaches out and squeezes my hand.

‘It was such a difficult time for you. You’ve got to remember that you were so young. Imagine that girl who wrote that email suddenly having to run a company and look after your dad with all the stuff that happened to him. From the sounds of it, you got thrown in at the deep end.’

Layla joined the company a few years after me and she didn’t witness first-hand the aftermath of when my mum died and when Dad’s drinking went out of control. Those were the worst years of my life. By the time she started work, Dad had sorted himself out, and I’d accepted that Porter’s was where I was meant to be. Dad helped me with a deposit to buy my own shoebox-sized flat and I’d started my Open University business studies course. I’d said it was because I wanted to get a degree, but it was mainly to keep busy to ensure I didn’t have time to think about things that hurt.