It hurt me that he’d left London for the weekend and hadn’t told me, and immediately I wondered if that was how he’d felt when I made plans to go to Belgium without giving him a heads up. If it was, I understood his reaction even more. When you’re a team, there’s common courtesies that are just rude if you don’t follow – like disappearing to a new location without an in-real-time update. Ah.

I told him it was a date. Have fun with Conor! Tell him hi! xxxxx

‘Okay,’ Adzo said, once she’d hung up. ‘Monday afternoon Moustache Man is going to come by the office if you can meet us there? He’ll bring the contracts for you, and then we’re going to do dinner if I can duck out early.’

‘I’ve never been so productive on a hangover,’ I said. ‘I honestly can’t thank you enough. I thought I’d be banished to some damp bedsit in Zone 24 and never be happy again. But I’ll be happy here. I can feel it.’

‘Me too.’ She grinned. ‘Here’s to new beginnings.’

She raised her empty chai cup into the air and I reached to the counter to pick mine up and mirror her.

‘To new beginnings,’ I said, accepting that my next step really could be this easy if I let it.

42

On the same day I officially signed for the lease on the flat, I went to an open evening about a counselling course – even if it was something I couldn’t do now, it was information for later, I figured. It was in a big stone building tucked away off one of the extravagant gardened squares, and inside a woman stood behind a fold-out table handing out pre-printed name tags. There were about twenty-five of us, segregated into rows of five, and I chose a chair at the back, closest to the aisle.

We were a motley crew. I reckoned I was probably one of the younger ones there, giving the sense that I wasn’t alone in being interested in a career change. I wasn’t sure how that made me feel – sad that counselling wasn’t our first choice, or reassured that maybe it was something you arrived at only with a bit of life experience. Surely that was a good thing in a counsellor. Nobody wants life advice from a spring chicken who hasn’t ever had a bad thing happen to them.

‘Good evening.’

A woman stood at the front with a PowerPoint presentation loading on the giant white screen behind her. ‘I’m Esther Essiedu, board member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and this is our informal informational event about training to become a counsellor or psychotherapist.’