But for the whole long night while I lay awake next to him, the same thought lapped around: Has he already slept with someone else? That is, until the early hours of the morning, when I slipped out of bed to brew tea and find a book to bury my face in, when the thought swapped to something altogether more terrifying: If I don’t sleep with him now, will he just go out and find someone else tonight? It was, I decided, the worst reason ever to have sex with your partner. So, when he got up, I carried on with the lie. And I said nothing about the three new messages I’d had through to my shiny new dating profile, all before breakfast time and all of which said only, ‘Hi’. But at least there’d been no more dick pics.

It was a busy week for us both. He had meetings galore and I had more things than ever pencilled in with the girls, plus an after-work social gathering to battle through; a team-building exercise that HR could tick off. He suggested the weekend and I suggested waiting and seeing. He kissed my cheek – ‘It’s okay if you have plans with someone’ – then grabbed his bag and headed for the door before I could come up with a response. I was too busy with a new thought: Shit, did he say that because he has plans with someone?

*

The entire public relations team – myself, Miranda, Helena, Xander, Verity and Max – were gathered together by our manager, Diane, to find out the details of our HR-sponsored treat. These things rolled around once a year and, in my experience, they’d never been anything but awkward, cringe-worthy and time-consuming. But we all made a habit of heading out for a drink afterwards which was, I thought, more of a team-building exercise than anything the higher-ups could throw at us.

‘Now remember,’ Diane said, envelope in hand, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to you all this evening either.’ Diane, as a senior staff member, was lumped in with other senior staff members for their own HR event rather than spending time with us, her team, which never made much sense to me. But I couldn’t see how her being on our nights out would have made them any easier either. She lifted the lip of the envelope and slid out an off-white card with the details on. ‘Well …’ She blinked hard twice, and my stomach flipped. ‘You’ll be going to the museum this evening for an after-hours life drawing class.’ She said it all in one breath and someone – maybe Xander – let out a curt laugh.

I linked arms with Verity, the one work friend who I would ever voluntarily hang out with outside of work. ‘Come on, then, let’s see how long this’ll take us to blag through.’ I tried to sound cheery, all the while thinking: Awkward, cringe-worthy and time-consuming …