‘I mean, surely in the moment you decide to kill yourself you are thinking most clearly of all. You know something is destroying you, you know you can’t cope. The direction of your thought process is entirely focused. I think it’s OK to admit that you knew what you wanted to do in that moment.’

‘I did. But what I’ve realised since is that I wasn’t doing it to get me away from anything, it was just to hurt other people as much as I could. I wanted Gavin and my mother to have to live with it forever. Which is not the right reason. Not that there are any right reasons. Anyway, you made me realise that finding a way to cope with everything is better than not coping, so thank you.’

‘It’s OK. Really, I’m just glad it ended the way it did. I mean, I’m glad you’re OK, I realise things didn’t go exactly to plan for your special day.’

‘No, they didn’t. God, every time I think about them together my skin crawls.’

‘Yes, it’s really difficult to comprehend, I’m sure. That’s not the role you think your mother will play on your wedding day. I can relate to that.’

‘You’re married?’

‘I was. It ended very soon after the wedding, unfortunately.’

‘What happened?’ she asks, sipping her water. I wouldn’t normally offer this information, but I suppose Lauren Pearce and I have terrible wedding days in common. I don’t have many other friends who appreciate how it feels.

‘In his speech, my husband made numerous jokes about my body hair, and I felt very let down by it.’

‘Oh. Why was he so cruel?’ she asks, a look in her eye suggesting she knows all about cruel men. I don’t like it – Liam is nothing like Gavin.

‘No, he wasn’t being cruel. He thought he was being funny. It was very ill-judged.’

‘OK, so why did you leave him?’ she asks, a little confused.

‘Because of the jokes,’ I clarify. ‘You should have heard him. He said he was happy to be marrying me because he loved cats but was allergic to them. Oh, and another one was, he said that my particular breed of woman is almost extinct because most women remove their body hair. He made some wisecracks about how spotting one like me in the wild, catching it and domesticating it was no easy task, but that when you get one they’re actually easy to tame. He basically compared me to an animal in front of all of my friends and his entire family. And my mother, which was maybe the most painful thing of all.’

‘Why?’