That stuck with me, because by that point I’d been with Alexander for nine years and we still had separate flats and 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 what we were working towards. I didn’t want to be a nag or That Girl. Everyone knows 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, with everyone moving on without me.

In that time Bri had met her boyfriend, too, and because of immigration stuff got married for the paperwork and only told us afterwards. Kezza had already been approved to adopt as a single woman and was actively family-finding, having used us all as references in her committed support network. She refused to settle for a mediocre man to do the most important job of her life with, she said, declaring that she was happy to go it alone and meet somebody later because motherhood was more important to her than marriage. So that left me, then, out of the four of us, not really doing anything besides treading water. The Core Four broke off into different parts like a star hitting the earth’s atmosphere and cracking into pieces. It made me panic about my place in the world.

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 own future. I think the wedding had moved him too, because the next week he brought over all these bits of paper for houses in Islington that his parents wanted to give him a deposit for. He wanted me to live with him, and I was thrilled – and relieved.