I reached out and took a Kettle Chip from the hand-thrown bowl Katie brought over. I tried not to feel bitter, but it had all come as quite a shock to me, aged twenty-seven, when most of my friends who I’d thought were also broke, suddenly, quietly, started moving out of gross house shares and buying new-build flats in gentrifying areas of London. All of them going red and muttering phrases like “Well, Mum and Dad said it made sense to give me this money now to save on inheritance tax.” Heather was one of them. Maybe I would’ve been too if my dad’s company hadn’t fallen apart.

“So, who were you meeting?” Heather leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through her mad curl of hair.

“Umm, this girl, Jessica. You may remember her? She came up to visit me in first year.”

I waited to see recognition cross my friend’s face. Heather was there the night everything fell apart.

“Jessica... Jessica.” She took a slurp of her drink and found inspiration. “Oh yeah. I think I remember. Is that the girl who got totally obliterated?”

I nodded as the memory flooded in like iced water. “That’s her.”

“I didn’t know you were still in touch.”

“She moved to America, but she’s back now.”

“God, it’s all coming back to me now. She was, like, insane pretty, wasn’t she? She was hell-bent on getting trashed, from what I can remember.” She barked out a laugh of nostalgia. “God. Uni. And Jessica. What a hot mess.”

I nodded. As usual, Heather’s words were exactly the right ones. I took a deep slug of my drink. “That’s one way of putting it.”

After the first round, we traipsed over to the stove to see if the risotto could be resuscitated, before Heather ordered artisan pizzas to rescue us. Katie stared at the pan and bit her lip, muttering her first utterance of the evening.

“Honestly, Heather, your only job was the risotto.”

She laughed and pulled Katie in for a big hug and kiss, while she squirmed. “I know. I’m sorry. I got distracted. I’ll pay for the pizzas myself.”

“We’re married. Your money is my money.”

“But it’s a gesture. A gesture.”

I started rummaging in my bag for my purse. “I’m happy to pay for my pizza?”

Heather batted me away. “Don’t be ridiculous. We invited you over for dinner. It’s our fault I cannot concentrate for forty minutes. Shall we have some red wine?” She didn’t wait for our reply and uncorked a bottle of merlot, swilling it into three globe glasses, before we all returned to our plush velvet chairs.

“Was work bad today?” I asked. Heather worked for a drastically underfunded NHS sexual health clinic, so the answer was almost always “yes.”