‘Nooooo!’ marvelled Jo, using a nacho as a shovel for some guacamole. She was wearing her afro hair in its natural curly state, and her only make-up was a sweep of bright red lipstick. She looked flawless – especially compared to me. I’d tried to do my make-up, but I knew it hid little of how I was really feeling. I still looked grey and sallow, despite the endorphin rushes of my daily workouts. ‘Are you going to do it?’ A blob of avocado fell to her pregnant belly, big enough to be a month away from taking maternity leave from her job as a history professor at UCL, and five weeks from her due date. She looked down to where her bump had caught it and sniggered. ‘Ooooops.’

Bri – petite, blonde and blue-eyed, a marketing director for a start-up run by one of the original employees of Google and the smartest person in any room, hands down – passed Jo a napkin, the corner of which she’d dipped in her water glass. ‘I’d totally do it,’ she said in her Lancastrian lilt, and took a glug from her gin fizz. She has mild cerebral palsy and so her muscles shake a bit, and I could see her deciding the cocktail was too full to lift without spilling, so she’d leaned forward to use the straw instead. Kezza hit her arm.

‘Don’t you dare offer to be her plus-one. If one of us is up for that it is I, the only other member of The Single Girls Support Club.’ She beamed at me and fluttered her long eyelashes as she made her case, impersonating an angel with an Essex twang, which is funny because Kezza is as tough as nails and angelic isn’t in even the top one hundred words I’d use to describe her.

Kezza has a theory that no matter how well-meaning a friend might be, there always exists a chasm between coupled-up friends and their single counterparts – whether they are single on purpose or not. She says only another woman who leaves a coffee date or meal out to go back to an empty bed truly understands certain things, and that sometimes, even knowing her friends are going home to another person leaves a heavy, peculiar sensation in her stomach. She’d had this theory since university. Even, she said, if a woman starts to loosely date a man after previously being in The Single Girls Support Club, she automatically leaves the club because she’s going home to the idea of someone, and that separates her from her single friend in a way too.

I’m in the club again, I thought, Urgh.

I glugged down the last three gob-fuls of my drink as a way to quiet intrusive and unhelpful thoughts. The girls waited for me to carry on.