She and this Paul bloke have been together eleven months. I’m supposed to have met him – ‘Damn, girl, we never hang out any more these days’ – she’s sure she’s mentioned him. This is huge news. This is way, way beyond the seven-month mark, which, as I know, is historically the problematic point for Alanna. Remember Michael in college?

I remember a creepy PhD student who worked part-time as a personal trainer.

Eleven whole months! A real achievement.

Most people suffer from the seven-year-itch: Alanna gets it seven months in. So what? Who am I to express this common-sense judgement that’s clogging up my throat, dooming and despising such beautiful young love?

Eleven whole months of bliss! Already she feels like she’s known him all her life.

Nonsense. Alanna doesn’t understand the notion of duration. Perhaps because the process of aging doesn’t seem to apply to her. When she has a new man, Alanna behaves like a loved-up schoolgirl, believes in the three-day rule of dating.

Jesus, I’m bitter. Alanna is happy. What’s wrong with that? She’s in love. It’s unrelated to my situation. She doesn’t even know Neil and I have broken up. Or does she?

I nearly lost my mind when she first started. I’d been happy at the care home and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t allowed to keep this one good thing. She’d given up nursing, hadn’t she? So how did she wind up in the same place as me when I had worked so hard to get there?

Though she was small, she was so perfectly charming, so pretty, so full of life, that it soon felt like she took up all of the space. There was just so much of her. I had forgotten the way she did this, shifting the axis of attention in any given scenario so that it all revolved around her.

When she joined I relearnt her ways with fresh horror. Whenever Alanna was working with me, I felt cornered. She never had anything interesting to say, but she was always so relentless in saying something, all the time, that I lost my voice. I told myself it was my fault for not knowing how to raise it. I’ve never been a loud person, but in the years after I ‘snatched Neil from her’, her ‘holiday boo’ – this was a joke she once made to loosen the tension – I had found my feet. With her around, I lost my grip, turning inwards to compensate for the fact that I was seething. I couldn’t believe that I was going through this for a third time.