I enlarge a photo she posted on our seventh anniversary ten years ago. It’s the two of us on the night we met at an under-eighteens’ disco – which I remember being taken on a disposable camera at the end of the night. We were fifteen and had therefore spent the previous hour snogging each other’s faces off, but not really talking. I’m not even sure I knew her name by this point – I just thought she was incredibly ‘fit’ and surprised she allowed me to spend time with her. I remember thinking she looked classy and cool in her glittery black dress that clung to her tiny frame. I was wearing my standard Ben Sherman chequered shirt and jeans. It was ‘the look’. Under-eighteens’ discos were essentially loads of kids pretending to be grown-ups – something I’m sure was helped along by the bottles of hooch we were all secretly swigging from when the adults weren’t looking, or had ‘downed’ before getting in.

I remember her best mate at the time, Rachel I think her name was, capturing this photo of us just as we were about to say goodbye. The lights had been turned back on then, and even in those days, it felt like a sharp comeback to reality. I was just relieved she still talked to me when my spotty chin wasn’t being disguised in the dim lighting.

She still reached up for a kiss goodbye, her slender arms draped over my shoulders and pulling me towards her.

‘Can I have your number?’ I asked between kisses, my voice doing that embarrassing thing where it bounces between octaves.

‘You give me yours,’ she insisted, pulling away. With that statement I thought I’d blown it, believing that by her having mine she could ghost me when she started seeing sense. Later on I realized it was so that I couldn’t do the same to her.

We spent the next three years seeing each other on Saturdays or Sundays around our weekend jobs in Romford – I worked in HMV, which always sounded far cooler than it actually was, and she worked in Clinton Cards. We’d meet for lunch and share a bag of Dinky Donuts as we walked around the market, and then maybe met again for a cheeky snog after work before being picked up by our parents. Her Indian family never really seemed to mind that Pia was hanging around with a white Jewish boy, although it took my mum a while to get her head around the path my life was taking – and how it differed to what she’d hoped for me. She got there. I imagine they all thought it was going to be a short romance. A young crush that we’d quickly step away from broken-hearted before finding ourselves with partners who aligned with their dreamy visions for their offspring – an Indian guy for her, and a Jewish girl for me.