Which is why it’s important to get out before anyone gets attached. I’ve trialled a few exit strategies now – blatant honesty, blocking, ghosting, slowly disappearing – and the only one that works one hundred per cent of the time is making them feel like they’ve dodged a bullet.

Ta-da.

But I can’t tell Thomas all that.

It’d hurt my thumbs to type it all out and he wouldn’t understand anyway.

He’d just tell me I’m scared, lend me one of his books on positive thinking, and try to change my mind the way people always do when I say these things out loud. Like my saying them is what makes them true and if they can just shut me up it might go away.

But the truth is, despite growing up watching my mother have her heart broken on a biannual basis, I still wanted love to be real as much as the next person. And when I met Harrison I thought maybe it was.

It wasn’t.

And there are only so many times life can show you the same truth before you accept it. So here’s what life has shown me about love: it’s nothing more than a beautiful biological hoax; the only way nature can get any sane person to stick around long enough to procreate. And that wouldn’t even be a problem, I’d totally buy into the program if it wasn’t so fucking temporary. If it didn’t always end badly. But it does. All it does is fuck you up and slow you down.

And I don’t have another 70,128 hours to waste.

I take another sip of coffee and consider my response. We only hooked up once, I acted crazy and yet he’s still being a good human and checking I’m okay. So if I reply with anything semi-sane he might give me the benefit of the doubt and want to start things up again. But if I continue on the meet-the-parents track and reply with something uber-crazed he’ll have it in writing. He could show people. And we work in the same industry.

So basically I’m fucked either way.

This, right here, is why sensitive people like me drink.

I reach for one of the little bottles of Scotch, twist open the top and pour it into my coffee then take a sip. Another. One more. There. A calm warmth flows through my veins as I glance out the window. There’s a grey and white pigeon sitting on one of the pots now. It gurgles some sort of pigeon sound and I take another sip of boozy coffee.

‘Bonjour, Mr Oiseau,’ I say, tapping on the glass. Oiseau is French for bird, but don’t get excited – my French is pretty sketchy. I did ‘A’ level French but most of what I know, I figured out via Reverso. ‘Tu ferais quoi?’ I just asked him what he’d do if he were me.

He gurgles something back and flies away. And there I have it, my answer, delivered via a pigeon and a very boozy coffee.