“Don’t put it down! You always used to do yourself down. I command you to grow out of it.”

I laughed with a sharp ha, and a warmth trickled into my stomach, lighting a long-dormant fire. The fire of how it felt to have Jessica there, believing in me, and urging me to believe in myself.

Be careful, I reminded myself. This is Jessica.

“Honestly, your blog post about suicide, it was amazing.”

“You read it?” I took another deep sip of wine. I wasn’t feeling generous enough to acknowledge her part in all of that. I wondered if she even remembered...

“Of course I read it. The whole world read it! It was going viral for days, with everyone adding in stuff. Actually,” Jessica put her glass down and glanced down at her winding hands, “I tried getting in touch when I saw it.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I sent you an email, saying how proud I was, telling you all my news, wanting to catch up.” She looked up again. “You never replied though.”

“I never got that email!”

“I was worried about coming tonight actually, after that. I thought maybe...” There it was. The unspoken, being danced around for the first time.

I shook my head, the awkwardness too much to bear. “Oh my God, Jessica, if I’d seen the email, I definitely would’ve replied. I promise! That time with the blog post, it was so insane, it must’ve got lost in my in-box or something.”

I sounded like such a dick, saying that, despite it being the truth. It was such a whirlwind year of my life—my niche article about suicide going viral. I remembered, when the blog post hit a million views, collapsing onto the rug of my shitty flat-share carpet and sobbing, praying for God to take all the attention away. The endless radio and TV appearances, the bombardment of emails from people sharing their own reasons to hold on for tomorrow, or their own suicide stories. Within a week, I’d gone from total obscurity as a not very successful journalist to being the face of suicide awareness. Each morning, getting picked up in a car and taken to a studio somewhere, then smothered in makeup, so I could then sit on a squashy sofa, and tell two TV presenters about the day I wanted to die. Each show created more emails, and more entries. Reflecting on it now, it seemed almost unsurvivable. And, yet, it’s how I got my job at Gah! That job had led to so many good things, and now had led to Jessica being back in my life after all this time. Was that a good thing?