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there?
    ‘Okay, bye then,’ I’d said.
    ‘Yeah, I will call though, yeah?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I’d said.
    ‘Take care of yourself, honey.’
    Then we’d turned and gone our separate ways. Two minutes later, I was gliding up the escalator when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming down the other way.
    ‘Sorry, I went the wrong way,’ he said, and I laughed to myself all the way home because, was there ever the end of a relationship that so exactly replicated the relationship itself? Hit-and-miss, half-baked, stop-start. Just a little bit of a shambles, basically, with some farce thrown in.
    No, finishing with Andy Cullen was the right thing to do, I decided, lying there until the bath water grew cool. I didn’t want to see him, I was just scared and putting off getting back to Joe.
    I decided to ring my sister, Leah, instead. It’s practically impossible to have a normal conversation on the phone with her these days because she’s always so busy with the kids, so it’s a numbers game: if you ring her ten times, you might just get lucky once. Jack, my five-year-old nephew answered. We had a short discussion about peregrine falcons – I totally dig the conversations I have with my nephew – then I said, ‘Is Mummy there?’
    There was some high-pitched squealing in the background, which could have been Leah or Eden, my three-year-old niece – it was difficult to tell.
    ‘She’s cleaning up Eden’s poo,’ said Jack.
    ‘Oh,’ I said, darkly.
    ‘She needed the toilet but didn’t make it. A poo fell out of her skirt in the kitchen.’
    I laughed. Then stopped. Jack wasn’t laughing. This is because Jack knew that a poo in the kitchen was on a par with the apocalypse for his mother.
    ‘Okay, well, don’t worry. Tell Mummy—’ I was about to tell him I’d call back later when Jack shouted:
    ‘Mummy! Aunty Robyn’s on the phone!’
    I could hear Leah’s sigh, literally metres away in the kitchen.
    ‘Well, tell Aunty Robyn that I am knee-deep in your sister’s crap at the moment and that her beautiful, adorable, butter-wouldn’t-melt niece’s bum has exploded all over my new kitchen floor.’
    ‘Oh.’ Jack came back on the phone. ‘Mummy said the C word.’
    ‘Mm,’ I said, ‘she did. That must mean she is very stressed. Tell her I’ll call her later, okay?’
    ‘She’ll call you later, Mummy!’
    ‘Ha! Well, she can try, but I’ll be doing bedtime then …’
    I reasoned that I may not have got to speak to my sister, but at least any yearnings for Andy, and/or a boyfriend or family life had been very successfully abated.
    That evening, I sat on the sofa, nursing a bottle of wine, writing fantasy replies to Joe, hoping that, the drunker I got, the more likely I’d be just to press ‘Send’.
    Dear Joe,
    I’m so sorry to hear about your mum and ordinarily I’d love to come to the funeral, but unfortunately I am on holiday …
    Dear Joe,
    I can hardly believe it’s taken me three days … the reason is, I was trying to think of a way of telling you …
    Dear Joe,
    Oh, my God, what must you think of me?! I rarely log onto Facebook so …
    In the end, three days, in fact, after Joe sent me the message, and mainly because I ran out of different ways to apologize, I wrote:
    Dear Joe,
    I’ll be there. See you at 3 p.m.
    Robyn x

Chapter Four
    Dear Lily
    I was thinking today that of all the things I’ve told you so far, I haven’t told you how I got together with your father. He says it’s typical of me, that the day we should get together is the day I save him, when what he doesn’t know is that he saved me.
    The date was 18 May 1997 – almost sixteen years ago! It was the end of the summer term, of high school, and we were signing one another’s shirts: SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMOND! Although, personally, I was doing nothing of the sort …
    Picture your mother: I am sixteen, I have thick dark hair with a fringe, and very recently I’ve committed trichological suicide by trying