‘Sorry!’ I called cheerfully, skipping back onto the pavement, giving him a wave as he replied with a very different hand gesture.

Reassured my beloved hadn’t changed in the slightest, I trotted on happily to my destination. It was good to be back.

Dead on the dot of twelve, I was standing in front of the address Rose had sent me the day before, the Tower of London glaring at me from across the street, old and imposing and swarming with tourists wearing sweatshirts with ‘Oxford’ emblazoned on the front, just in case you were wondering whether or not they’d been to Oxford. The office was snugged in between a huge glass-fronted co-working space and an ancient bookshop with a crumbling brick facade. Just a narrow sliver of a building with a glossy red door, no buzzer, no knocker, and only a small brass plaque that confirmed I was in the right place.

After checking the sneaky middle buttons of my white shirt and gently tapping the false eyelashes that seemed like such a good idea when I was doing my makeup that morning, I checked my watch once more to make sure. It was time. I rapped hard on the door, flickers of excitement sparking in my arms and legs, my entire body humming with a dangerous cocktail of adrenaline and the caffeine from three extremely large coffees.

‘Come in.’

I opened the door. Inside the tiny, low-ceilinged room was a desk, and behind the desk, sat a woman.

‘Hi,’ I said with big smile and bright eyes. ‘I’m Francesca Cooper?’

She looked me up and down, glanced at her computer screen, and made a small, confirmatory noise as if to let me know that yes, I was, in case I was the one who wasn’t sure.

‘Sarah Pierce,’ she replied. ‘Come in.’

Parking my suitcase by the door, I sat in the only available seat on my side of the desk and searched the room for clues. The office was extremely small and her large, modern desk looked extremely out of place, taking up more than its fair share of space. The floors were dark wood, the walls were whitewashed, ancient-looking beams supported the very low ceiling and all I could smell was coffee. A small window at the back of the room was the only source of natural light, and behind the desk, a narrow staircase wound around itself, disappearing into the ceiling. It felt old in the way that only London ever did, as though it had always been here. I wondered how many different people had walked into this room in the centuries since it was built, and how many of them had been forced to pee in a Costa Coffee cup, due to the absolute state of the train toilet.