‘I still think I did the right thing, sending him away,’ I told the tiny robin redbreast that bounced along the low stone wall beside me, much less concerned about falling on his arse than I. ‘Granted, I haven’t read a single self-help book in my life, but they all say it’s never a good idea to bounce from one relationship to another. Rebounds never last. Real life is not a fairy tale.’

He cocked his head to one side and looked back at me with bright black eyes, confirming I was certainly no Cinderella.

‘So glad we agree,’ I said as I crossed the road to the Botanical Gardens, the little bird fluttering on ahead of me, watching me plant one foot carefully in front of the other. My plan was to spend the rest of the day snout deep in a bottle of Bailey’s, not nursing a broken ankle at A&E.

‘I just can’t stop thinking about him,’ I sighed, taking a seat on a bench just inside the gates. ‘I know it’s stupid, I feel stupid, but I don’t know how to make it stop.’

The new Fran, the single, happy Fran who had her career on track, a wonderful sister and a fabulous best friend, didn’t need a man to be happy. That was an unequivocal fact. Ending things with Stew had shown me I was stronger, confirmed I was better off by myself than wasting my life with the wrong person, but somehow, that knowledge only made things worse. I wasn’t interested in dating, I’d declined the apps, the set-ups, all the friends-of friends that already had been thrust my way. This wasn’t a case of glomming on to the next boy-shaped thing that came along and I meant what I said, I really didn’t need a man.

But I wanted Evan.

The robin swooped into a flock of little birds, all of them fighting over what looked like an entire loaf of breadcrumbs and as they all flapped and hopped and pecked around each other, I couldn’t work out which was my robin any more.

Resting my elbows on my knees, I cupped my face in my mittens and pouted, phone resting on my knee. Christmas made everyone extra melancholy, that’s all it was. How many people had sent texts they would regret in the last twenty-four hours? Thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands. Half of all humans with a phone, I expected. He probably wasn’t even as wonderful as I remembered. He was probably rude to waiters and didn’t tip very well. For all I knew, he was one of those men who turned his underwear inside out instead of doing a load of washing.