That stuck with me, because by that point I’d been with Alexander for eight years and we still had separate flats, separate social lives, and even though we had fun together on date nights or the weekends he wasn’t playing rugby, we couldn’t quite seem to align with what we were working towards. I didn’t want to be a nag or That Girl. You know That Girl. The one issuing ultimatums about getting engaged or breaking up. I want all of you, or none of you! That sort of thing. I wanted to be cooler than that. And I was. For the whole of our twenties I was the cool girl, but then as my university friends got engaged, and then married, and then pregnant, bam-bam-bam, I went from being twenty-nine and happily ambling along to the other side of thirty, everyone moving on without me. In that time Brianna had met her boyfriend, too, and because of immigration stuff got married for the paperwork and only told us afterwards. Kezza had already started looking at adopting as a single woman, refusing to settle for a mediocre man to do the most important job of her life with. She said she was happy to go it alone and meet somebody later. Motherhood was more important than marriage to her. And that left me, out of the four of us. The Core Four, breaking off into different parts like a star hitting the earth’s atmosphere and cracking off into pieces in the sky.

It’s a lie what they say about friends being the family you choose. Friends pair off and go on to make their own families, and it did make me wobble, standing beside Alexander in the church as one of my favourite people committed her life to somebody she’d known just over a year. That’s when I finally brought it up with him – that we needed to think about our future. I think the wedding had moved him, too, because the next week he brought over all these bits of paper for houses his parents wanted to give us a deposit for. There’s no feeling quite like it, when somebody says out loud that you’re the person they want to build something with. I think the most uncertain bit of my life was turning thirty and feeling like everyone else had their life together and I wasn’t quite an adult yet. Moving in with Alexander made me a grown-up, on the same track as everyone else. I made him dinners and organized our furniture, and got weirdly into doing stuff I swore I never would – being the one to buy his mum’s birthday card, or suggesting dinner parties so I could meet the partners of his work colleagues and uni pals. I enjoyed it. Reveled in it. We finally wanted the same things, too. Or, at least, I thought we did.