Learning who he was from titbits of gossip and second-hand information was like tuning an old FM radio, the hum of white noise getting sharper and sharper until we were queuing one Tuesday night for prawn crackers and old-skool R’n’B at The Willow, and there he was. He stopped to talk to the people in front of us – I was there with the Core Four, who’d been my immediate pals since Freshers’ Week – and we caught one another’s eye. Alexander spent the next five minutes looking over the shoulder of who he was chatting with to do it again, and again. Staring. I remember the girls nudging me, getting silly on my behalf.

It took a year for anything to happen. I’d been half-heartedly seeing a guy I’d met on holiday, and although it was hardly fireworks with him once we got home – holiday romance has the word ‘holiday’ in it precisely because it doesn’t work when you’re back – I would never have cheated.

I couldn’t believe Alexander was interested in me anyway. I’m pretty enough, I suppose, but I’m more of a best friend pretty than a leading lady knockout, and I’m clever, but not a genius. I’m like a good wallpaper: happily part of the background but when you notice it you might point and say, ‘Oh! That’s nice.’ It’s okay. Being exceptional would mean being visible, being seen. But if you’re seen, you’re talked about, and I’d had enough dissection of my body and personality and intellect at home, with the beady eyes and rolling commentary of Mum. I preferred flying under the radar. And, if Alexander could have his pick of anyone, why would he have wanted me? I was a seven-out-of-ten kind of a girl, and all the full scores lusted after him. He was eleven out of ten himself, with big brown eyes and a square jaw that was defined enough to make his broken, crooked nose look as though it was part of the design, not a flaw. He’d been to private school and had a confidence about him. The world had never told him no, so disappointment was a foreign theory. It was a law of attraction: he only expected the very best for himself, and so the very best is what happened.