It’s Friday afternoon and the offices of Luna London are a hive of excitement. The younger interns and PAs are clustered round each other’s desks, testing out some of our new make-up lines and getting ready for the night ahead. I smile as one of them, Layla – a strikingly attractive woman with long brown hair – swaggers up and down the gangway, pouting to the sound of Sia’s ‘Chandelier’, which is blasting out across the office. This is their unofficial catwalk and as I watch them I feel a tinge of envy, remembering how Lottie and I would make a ritual of getting ready for a night out when we were at Durham. We’d pour a glass of wine and give each other’s outfits the once-over. She’d do my eyeliner, which I was terrible at, and I’d tease her hair into big curls. I recall that strange butterfly sensation I used to feel in my stomach before a big night out, the thought that anything could happen.

Then I look at the image I have just pulled up on my screen – a five-storey Victorian townhouse in Highgate – and I think how the idea of creating a perfect home now outweighs any desire to go out drinking and clubbing. How did that happen? Is it an age thing? You reach your thirties and suddenly your needs change. I prefer to think that it’s down to meeting Connor. Creating a home that we can be a family in is all part of that.

I click through a few more images of the Highgate house, imagining what I would do to it if I owned it. There’s a secluded sixty-foot garden with a raised seating area. I picture the herbs I would plant in terracotta pots, the subtle lighting I would introduce. Inside the house there’s a huge bathroom that would benefit from a roll-top bath and Moroccan-style tiling. As I’m lost in this reverie my phone rings on the desk beside me. I smile when I see Connor’s name on the screen.

‘Hello,’ I say, minimizing the webpage on my computer. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

‘Good thoughts, I hope,’ he says, his voice rather breathless.

‘Always,’ I reply. ‘Where are you? You sound like you’ve been running.’

‘I’m just on my way to Shoreditch,’ he says, his voice momentarily drowned out by a piercing siren. ‘Which is why I’m calling. There’s a boxing match tonight. The company’s sponsoring it. I meant to tell you about it earlier but I’ve been so busy this week …’

His voice cuts out and there’s a fizzing noise on the line.

‘Connor? I can’t hear you.’

‘Sorry, is that better? I’ve stopped in a doorway.’

‘Yes, I can hear you now. What were you saying? Something about a boxing match?’