‘So, I have news,’ she says in a sing-song happy voice.

‘You got the job?’ I ask, hopeful. She’s still back in London, works in corporate communications at an investment bank, hates her boss, hates her job, and has been waiting for word on a new one just like it for weeks.

‘No. But almost as good,’ she replies. ‘I think I saw my soulmate tonight.’

I first met Camilla twelve years ago when we shared a flat at university. We bonded over big dreams – I was going to change the world one hard-hitting news story at a time and she was going to revolutionise Vogue – and a shared hatred of passive-aggressive Post-it notes left on the fridge. But then life went how life went. Camilla finished her degree with first class honours but graduated into a market where the only job for a journalism student was corporate communications. And I quit after my first year to get a day job in an office (marketing) because my boyfriend at the time, Harrison, was a musician on the verge of big things. In my defence, we were a team, he was supposed to be my love story, and someone had to pay the rent until he got his big break.

That someone was me.

In hindsight I suppose I could have kept writing; hindsight will always fuck you up like that. But somehow at the time there wasn’t enough oxygen for two artists in our relationship: our roles had been set. He was the creative one and I was the support staff. And at the beginning I didn’t really mind. He was hot and he toured Europe a lot and I’d use my holiday days to go along. I’d spend my days wandering through galleries filled with Klimt, Picasso, Warhol and Duccio, learning from gallerists about how the old masters used pinhole techniques for perspective, how the cracks in a painting can tell you as much as a fingerprint and what led each artist to the moment the world said: ‘ahhh’. It was always that last part that fascinated me most: who was Duchamp before Fountain? What did Picasso’s earliest sketches look like? Would The Kiss still be Klimt’s most famous painting, had a set of three ‘pornographic’ ceiling panels not been destroyed in a fire in World War II? So for me, it wasn’t the likes of the Mona Lisa, but rather the early works, the lost works, the clumsy sketchbooks that held secrets undisclosed by the glossy brochures handed out by galleries, that had me fall in love with art.

Harrison, on the other hand, spent his days ‘rehearsing’ (code for fucking Melody, who will become more important to this story quite soon). I kept telling myself we were living the dream, and it looked that way to anyone back home in grey old Kent who was scrolling through my social media but if I’m honest, really honest, it was lonely. He had my heart and he wouldn’t give it back; he wouldn’t even let it beat beside me half the time. Every year that passed saw him becoming a bit more depressed that he wasn’t famous yet, while my life force was bled dry trying to make him happy. By the third act my soul was as shrivelled and dry as a fossil.