‘It’s a Friday night.’ She sounds puzzled. Of course. I should have realized. My mum has a better social life than I do. ‘I’d have thought you’d be out.’

‘You obviously are.’ I can’t help the note of bitterness creeping into my voice.

She sighs. ‘Yes. Yes, I am …’ Her voice is suddenly drowned by a burst of laughter. ‘Listen, Jess, I can’t talk now. Can I ring you back tomorrow?’

‘I … Yes, that’s great.’

‘Speak soon. Love you.’ And the phone goes dead.

I stare at the screen for a few moments before tossing it onto the sofa. It’s only seven thirty but now the evening looms ahead and I feel lonely and trapped in this apartment that doesn’t feel like mine. I wander into the bedroom with photographs of Aoife and her friends taken on various nights out over the bed, and open the top drawer in Rory’s side cabinet, retrieving the little square box. I sit on the edge of the bed and admire the ring again. It really is beautiful. I try it on to find it’s only a little bit big. Why can’t I be normal? Heather got married. Heather had a baby.

My mind goes back to when Margot let us spend the night in one of the static caravans. It must have been only a few months before that fateful summer and the caravan park was quiet, the season not yet kicking in. We took a four-berth right on the edge of the park, with views of the cliffs and the bay of Tilby. We could have had a bedroom each but we’d slept in the living-room part with the sofa folded down into a bed. It was early April and cold, and we’d huddled together in our individual sleeping-bags, talking of all the things we would do when we left school.

‘I never want to get married,’ I’d said, pulling the edge of the sleeping-bag up to my chin. It smelt mildewy. ‘I want to travel. See the world. Not be tied down by some man.’

‘Same,’ agreed Heather, wriggling like a maggot in her luminous yellow sleeping-bag. ‘I want to go to Paris and write and wander along the Left Bank and maybe take a lover.’

We’d laughed at this. Take a lover. It was something we’d heard in a film and now it was a running joke. We weren’t going to be tied down. We’d just take a lover.

Yet Heather never left Tilby or, as far as I can work out, took a lover. She met Adam at eighteen and married him at twenty-two. Margot had said he was her first and only boyfriend.

I’d been twenty-nine when I’d met Rory, and he definitely hadn’t been my first. Far from it.