I still love you and always will was what I really wanted to say, but I wouldn’t make him feel any worse for what was going on in his life right now. We’d come to a natural ending, led by circumstances and odds stacked against us.

‘You’ll always be the one,’ he whispered to me and my stomach flipped. ‘I mean it, Charlie Taylor. No one will ever come close to you. You know that and I do too.’

I dabbed under my eyes with my pyjama sleeve and focused on the glitz and glamour of the Strictly performers on telly. They all looked way too sexy and glamorous for my mood so I turned it over to the X Factor where someone was singing an Adele song about how ‘we could have had it all’.

Wonderful. I turned the TV off.

‘If you tell me not to do this, I won’t,’ he said, giving me one last chance to salvage the crumbs of our so-called relationship, whatever type of relationship it even was to begin with. I could feel his longing despite the distance. He wanted me to tell him to wait just a little bit longer. He wanted this mention of another love interest to buck up my ideas and move me to take action at long last.

I never wanted to make this final call, but I knew, no matter how much my heart was breaking, that I couldn’t switch off from the deep, raw guilt that lay within me. I couldn’t rub Matthew’s nose in it by bringing Tom into our lives again, no matter how much I wanted to be with him. It was out of my hands, or at least that was what I was trying to convince myself.

‘I can’t tell you to do that, Tom,’ I whispered, gripping my sleeve as hot tears poured down my face. ‘I wish you well with everything in life. I wish you all the love in the world, always.’

‘No, Charlie,’ he pleaded. ‘You don’t want this. I don’t want this. I won’t even go out tonight. I’ll wait for you, even if it takes forever.’

I pictured Matthew in his wheelchair, his whole life wasted over feelings he couldn’t control, an identity that he hadn’t been able to face up to for so long, and now a life of suffering over a bad decision he had made because he was so upset at me and Tom.

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ I told him. ‘I can’t hold you back any longer. Goodbye.’

He hung up at that and I spent the entire evening wailing like a banshee over how life was so shit and so unfair. I wanted to jump on a plane and interrupt his evening with the ‘lovely Claire from the record company’ and just be with him once and for all. But I couldn’t do that.