First, I checked my secret email account, the one you’d suggested I set up just for you. There was nothing there, just my own plaintive requests for you to call me. Then I went to Google and opened a private browser window to type in your name. It felt wrong somehow – I had never said it out loud, because nobody knew about you. I searched for Sean Sullivan, but there was nothing. Well, there were hits, of course – Sullivan was a very common name – but I trawled through several, realising they weren’t you. Likewise with Facebook. I knew you had an account, because you’d mentioned a few times how annoying you found various behaviours, like people boasting about their run times, or pictures of their kids on the first day of school, but I couldn’t find you there.

Once you had said, ‘Look at all these couples. As soon as they start posting how happy they are, it’s divorce within six months. Like clockwork.’ And some friends of mine from uni had done that – a flurry of sunset-cocktails shots with ‘it’d be rude not to’ and ‘so it begins’ and ‘so grateful for this one’, then voilà, a few short months later they announced they were splitting up. I had wanted to call you straight up and tell you, laugh with you about it. But I couldn’t, of course.

Sean Sullivan consultant. Sean Sullivan surgeon. Sean Sullivan doctor. Nothing. Again, I searched for it with each hospital in the area. Nothing, nothing. My fingers were growing cold in the chilly studio.

Then, I remembered my idea. Dr Andrew Holt – the story you told me, a mix-up in the bookings. He was a colleague of yours, you’d said; some admin person at the hospital had got confused. These temps, honestly. A mad idea began to grow. Was it possible that you really were Andrew? That you’d given me a fake name once it became clear we’d see each other again? I couldn’t believe it. But there was clearly no doctor called Sean Sullivan, no Dr Sullivans of any kind working in the area hospitals. I googled it so fast I spelled it wrong, but there he was. Dr Andrew Holt, Surrey General Hospital, Obs and Gynae. No photo, but it must be him. Or you, maybe? My pulse sky-rocketed. Why did you work in Surrey? I’d always had the impression you lived here in Kent, perhaps further south, Tunbridge Wells or the posh villages around it. If I went there, to the place you worked, maybe someone would know something. It was so thin, but all I had were these vague fragments of you, like a letter torn to pieces. I had to know. I was maybe going to have your child. I owed it to him, or her, to at least try.