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‘I like reading,’ I say weakly.

‘Cool, cool,’ Henry says, nodding with great enthusiasm and clearly not listening but instead preparing the next question he’s going to ask. ‘And what are you studying? Oh wait, you already told me that when we were texting, I remember.’ He laughs, rubs his hands on his jeans again. He’s so nervous, it feels contagious.

The funny sparky person I was when we first texted is gone. Maybe she only existed in my mind. I shouldn’t ever read back over those texts, just in case.

Harper nudges me, and I look at her with relief. Save me. ‘There’s a guy that keeps looking over here,’ she says after a minute. ‘At you,’ she adds.

‘Who?’ I say. Probably someone looking on in sympathy as I struggle through my Henry flirting.

‘He’s turned his back on us now, but that guy in the corner.’

I look where Harper is pointing.

It can’t be. Surely not. I have enough to deal with tonight.

My stomach is already sinking and clenching when he halfturns and I confirm who it is.

Tristan.

Tristan is here, in my local pub, in my city, in my line of sight.

Fuck.

Fuck.

‘Fuck!’ I say.

‘What?’ Harper’s concerned.

‘That’s Tristan,’ Jesse says, in a voice that’s way too loud. ‘Brooke’s ex,’ he explains to Penny and Henry.

I watch as Tristan puts his hand on the back of a girl. It’s Kendra. I know her mostly from my social media stalking of them, which I still do, almost subconsciously, as part of my weekend wind-down bedtime routine. Just checking in on the ten or twenty accounts of people, some of whom I know and some I don’t, to see what they’ve been doing with their week. Kendra looks better in person. That almost never happens. Oh god, oh god.

‘Tristan and his girlfriend,’ I add.

Penny puts her hand over her mouth and looks suitably horrified.

‘What do you want us to do,’ Harper asks. She’s fake-smiling, turning to me, talking through gritted teeth. I appreciate she immediately knows that this is a crisis and that we need to pretend outwardly that it is not.

‘Act normal,’ I say, also speaking through a gritted-teeth fake smile.

‘Why wouldn’t we act normal?’ Jesse says.

‘Because Tristan is here with his girlfriend,’ I say. I almost say ‘who he dumped me for’ but I would rather Henry didn’t know that fact, because even though I am already certain that Henry and I have no future, I still want him to have a sliver of respect for me as a person.

My palms are sweaty now. I am trying to see Tristan while not obviously looking. If you asked me this morning, ‘Do you care what Tristan thinks of you?’ I would have said, ‘Of course not’, and I would have meant it, one hundred per cent. And now I see him here, in the flesh, I feel the complete opposite. It’s not so much I care what he thinks, it’s that I need him to have very specific thoughts about me at the end of the night when he’s lying in bed, thoughts that include the words ‘God, she looked great’ and ‘She’s even smarter than I remember’ and ‘She really was too good for me’. Nothing I currently have at my disposal will make him think those thoughts. I need to quickly think of at least three impressive things I’ve done since we broke up to drop into conversation and also turn back time so I can change my decision to not wash my hair this afternoon.

‘I’m freaking out. I can’t just sit here and let him see me, here, like…like…this.’ I sound near hysterical.

‘Like what?’ Jesse says.

Henry is looking at me like I might be losing my mind. Clearly neither of them have the emotional capacity to understand how everything in my life now hinges on a possible interaction with Tristan.

‘Like this.’ Exposed, unprepared, with no achievements, no secret weapons, at hand. Tristan will look at me, and he’ll somehow know about everything: Dad standing me up, me hugging the waiter, the exploding cyst, the ingrown hair I currently have on my bikini line, that I haven’t kissed anyone since him.

Harper puts her hand on my arm. She understands. Or maybe she’s just learning how to read my anxiety spirals.

‘Do you want to hide from him?’ Harper says.