Jessica: Ian is a lying dickhead. He’s had a gf THIS WHOLE TIME. She lives in Spain. Are you around for a call?

I rang her immediately, tucked up in my hoodie, having a disco nap before we went out that night.

“Oh, hon, are you OK?” I asked, breathless.

She wasn’t crying. “He’s not worth the tears,” she kept saying, and I could picture her on the other end of the phone, her jaw set and resolute. Grasping desperately to any power she had left by not showing how hurt and humiliated she was. She relayed the details of how she found out like it was the shipping forecast. The girlfriend was having a year abroad for work. Jessica had found a stash of their framed photographs in his bottom drawer. The week he’d had a mates’ holiday, he was really over in Spain, seeing her. He hadn’t expected to fall in love with Jessica. He’d only flown to Spain to break things off with Kerry, but he couldn’t follow through with it. Could Jessica please let him know if she was going to forgive him or not, because, if she didn’t, he thought it was still worth trying to make things work with Kerry instead.

“I honestly don’t know what to say,” I told her, which was true. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” she replied sharply. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I winced at her tone down the line, thinking, You asked me to call you, Jessica. I took a breath, working out what to say next. She was at her worst like this. Blunt. Closed off. A fortress of a woman.

“I mean, anyone would be upset.”

“He’s not worth it.”

“OK...well, it’s going to be amazing when you come up here.” I tried to cajole her. Once she saw Manchester, she’d realize how limited her life was, and grow. “We’ll have a proper girls’ night out. I’ll show you all the best bars. You’re going to LOVE Heather. She’s the best person to talk to about boy stuff. She has all these academic theories about them that make you feel so much better.”

“Who’s Heather again?”

“You know? My housemate.”

She paused. “Oh, yeah, cool. I remember. It’s going to be great, you’re right. How many grams shall I bring up?”

“Oh.” I bit my lip, searching my uni wall for inspiration on how to handle this. I’d made a massive corkboard montage, and a picture of Jessica and me was right in the middle, next to a cartoon Danny had drawn of me in a seminar that I still looked at for at least five minutes every day. “Umm... About that... Would you mind not bringing any drugs? We can drink and stuff. But none of my friends up here do drugs, and I think it could make them uncomfortable.”

The longest, coldest, silence.