I received an email on a Tuesday.

I was eating toast.

The email was from huxi. It thanked me for my continued support of the brand. It used the phrase "continued support" in a way that suggested they had looked at my order history and drawn some conclusions. I was not embarrassed. I have moved past embarrassment. This took eight months and seven products and one particularly clarifying Wednesday in Amalfi that I do not discuss.

I want to preface this by saying that I did not plan any of it.

I came back from Amalfi on a Sunday evening, got a taxi from the airport, ate toast standing at the kitchen counter, and went to bed at nine o'clock feeling like a person who had just lived an entire other life in seven days and needed some time to let it settle.

I bought Leda The Swan the week after the Sophia evening.

I want to be honest about that timeline because I think it's relevant. I didn't agonise over it. I didn't spend three days telling myself I was being impulsive or that I should think about it carefully or any of the other things I might have told myself eighteen months ago. I just went to the huxi website on a Thursday morning with a coffee going cold beside me, found her immediately because I'd looked at the page approximately six times already without admitting to myself why, and clicked buy.

I went on holiday alone. This was deliberate. Seven nights on the Amalfi Coast, a small apartment with a terrace, seventeen unread books and absolutely no obligation to consult another human being about anything. I told Amy I was going off-grid. I meant it. I was going to read, swim, eat well, drink moderately, and return to London feeling like a person who has her life together.

I lasted four days.

I want to be clear that I had every intention of keeping the Sophia evening entirely to myself for at least a fortnight. I had filed it away in the part of my brain marked personal, next to my PIN number and the specific humiliation of a work Christmas party in 2019 that we will never speak of.

I need to preface this by saying that nothing in my years of reading moderately filthy novels, my extensive and poorly curated dating history, or my absolute conviction that I was a woman who broadly knew what was going on in the world prepared me for the evening I'm about to describe.

On Saturday morning Matt turned up at my door with a coffee from the good place two streets away and a look on his face that suggested he'd been rehearsing something.

He handed me the coffee. He stood in the doorway.

"I'd like to take you on an actual date," he said. "Not a party where you arrived from someone else's disaster. A real one. On purpose."

Alex texted me on a Thursday.

Not come over tonight or I've been thinking about you. Just: Can we talk?

Which, in anyone's language, is a sentence that sits in your stomach like a cold stone.

I went over on Friday evening. He'd made food, which he'd never done before — a proper thing, with effort — and we sat at his kitchen table like two adults and he looked at me and said:

"I think I'm falling in love with you."