‘Your mother’s right,’ said Dad, crossing back to the table, holding a platter of meat aloft like he was Gordon Ramsey himself. ‘I’ll call you a cab.’ He sat down, glared at me. ‘Maybe one day you’ll stop ruining every family occasion you bother to turn up for.’

His casual scorn pushed me over the edge.

‘Let’s start with Christmas,’ I said, standing up, my chair screeching against the Spanish tiles. ‘You can all have the perfect fucking family celebration you’re dreaming of without me.’

‘No, Rachel,’ said Mum. ‘Christmas is precious. You just need to take some time to calm down…’

‘What I want to know,’ I said, heading for the door, ‘is how many other Esthers there are out there? It’s not a good look these days, Dad.’

I risked a final look back at the tableau of the table. Mum didn’t look quite so calm anymore: I didn’t know whether to be triumphant or heartbroken by the fact.

I rang MBNA first. Perhaps it was too close to Christmas, and they had a policy about naked desperation. Either way, they wouldn’t give me a cash advance. I googled frantically, finally calling a supermarket credit card line and lying in response to every question the kind-sounding man in his call centre on the other side of the world asked me. I had a flatmate, apparently, who paid their half of the rent in cash, and my glittering career involved generous bonuses that hadn’t yet appeared in my bank account. As he went away to process my credit score, every fibre of my being churned with tension. Escaping family Christmas was feeling like life or death. He sounded genuinely happy for me when he gave me the good news: perhaps he could sense that I was lightheaded with relief.

I texted Amber immediately, fat tears falling onto the screen of my phone, blurring my words.

I wish I could call you. Today was worse than my worst nightmare. I hate my family. Coming to the retreat, if you’ll have me. R xx

Nothing came back. There was one bottle of wine in the back of the cupboard, my ‘break glass in case of emergency’ option, and I sat it on the coffee table with a corkscrew, simultaneously comforted and devastated by the knowledge that there was no one to stop me opening it.

The shrill ring of the phone broke the silence. I looked tentatively at the screen: Amber.

‘Hello,’ I said, my voice unsteady. ‘I didn’t think we were allowed to speak outside…’

‘Rachel,’ she said. The warmth of her voice turned on the tap of my tears. ‘Rules are made to be broken, don’t you think?’

They certainly were.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It was so awful today, they—’