What an odd thing to say, I thought as I waited in the queue. As if she’d mind if I left my coat with her. Was it me, or were we both a little nervous? At the back of the coffee shop, there was a man sitting on his own muttering to himself. ‘You don’t know, do yer?’ he kept saying, over and over again. ‘You don’t know? How do you know? You don’t know anything.’ There were two young women sitting at the table nearest to the counter and they kept glancing over at him, then talking to each other in low voices in an Eastern European language I couldn’t identify.

When I sat down again, Rosaria and I talked for a while about my birthday, and about another party that was coming up, then she left a long pause.

‘I feel I’ve hardly seen you recently …’ she said.

‘Yeah, I know, it’s been really busy …’ I said, lifting my coffee cup carefully. It was still perilously full.

There was a pause while we both drank from our cups. Then she added, ‘You hardly text me either. Even when we’re busy, we’ve always texted.’

Right, so it was coming out now. It was true, I had neglected her recently. And it wasn’t just work or winter, I couldn’t use either of those as the whole excuse. Matty and I had fallen into such a domestic routine. He loved me being home when he got back from work, he said; coming home to me meant the end of the working day. He hated coming home to an empty flat and he didn’t like eating alone. I knew all the rules about not dropping your women friends when a man came into your life but really, Matty and I had only been living together a few months – wasn’t there bound to be a period of adjustment? And it wasn’t all plain sailing, I had discovered. Living with someone – the state that looks so enviable from the outside. I felt as though I was only just beginning to realise how difficult it could be, how many allowances you had to make. I’d even been prepared to ask him to leave not that long ago, but for the last couple of weeks, he’d been a real sweetheart. We were both learning, after all, and it took time and effort – and that was hard to explain to a friend.

In the pause in our conversation, I took my phone out of my pocket and checked for texts, more as a delaying tactic while I thought of what to say next as much as anything else. I no longer knew how to confide in Rosie – once upon a time, I would have told her everything.

‘Am I keeping you?’ she said.

Did I detect a certain dryness in her tone? ‘No, of course not,’ I said brightly.

Another pause.