Neil was delighted to discover that Alanna was back in my life. He fell victim to bouts of nostalgia in which he reminisced about his twenties. It didn’t help that she was the last girl he’d slept with before we got together. I couldn’t help but be petty. I said things like, ‘It’s great to see you’re still thinking about her.’ ‘I was thinking of us, silly,’ he said. ‘About us getting together for the first time.’ But he wasn’t. He’d beg me to tell him more about Alanna, pinching my arm sometimes, which irritated me.

What had she been up to all those years? How could she pop back into my life like that? I’d tell Neil, ‘Honestly, she is the kind of nightmare you never want to come across. She’s still the same as you remember. Can you believe that? Total bimbo. She’s useless. She won’t learn. She is honestly a dog of a nurse. I don’t think she’s got the brain capacity.’

It amused him to hear me talking of someone like that. He thought it very out of character. ‘God, you hate this girl so much!’ He’d happily clap his hands, like my hatred wasn’t a thing to be taken seriously, but a cute little birthmark he’d just noticed on my back.

In time I found ways to conceal my outrage. It wasn’t professional so I told myself, ‘Be the bigger person.’ Sometimes repeating that sentence out loud to myself helped. I endeavoured to get to know Alanna better. Which was easy, as it would’ve been impossible to tune out her constant chattering anyway. She told me the story of her life, the years we’d spent apart, like some kind of fairy-tale that had reached its logical ending.

It was really quite ordinary stuff. Someone had offered her a modelling contract just before she started her second year at college and she’d gone for it. That was why she’d dropped out. I’d imagined some kind of tragedy. ‘Hindsight is wisdom,’ she says. ‘I think I was running away from my own destiny.’ The contract had been a bit of a hoax – not a bad one; she just wasn’t making as much as she’d expected. But her confidence took a terrible blow and she became very depressed. She really wasn’t coping. She overcompensated by attending too many castings, photo shoots that led to little more than nothing. It was exhausting. She cheered herself up with kiddy drugs, abusing her ADHD medication, staying up all night, frantically searching the internet for the right opportunity, which – she was sure – was out there for her. It got bad. ‘At one point, I was behaving like a bit of an addict!’ she chirps. Which is unsurprising, since she was; that’s why she was sent to a rehabilitation centre.