Back then I felt like there would be one thousand New Year’s Eves to my lifetime. It never occurred to me that they were limited. Rare, even.

Furthermore, I’d never been warned about a man’s “girl best friend”.

She was Eastern European, had dark curly hair, pale skin. Two great green jewels for eyes. She was nearly a foot taller than us both, and subscribed to every important art magazine imaginable, some of them printed on the nicest paper I’d ever touched. They sat in perfectly splayed piles on her reclaimed wood coffee table.

She would host us that year, along with her boyfriend, Bobby, for a little New Years fête. Bobby was that year’s lover, even though she found a way to keep talking about the last one, and the one before that. They all stayed relevant, somehow. Would you believe this one pocket-dialled her and the other one wanted her at his mother’s funeral? Needed her there.

They matched each other physically, Carina and Bobby, both tall and handsome, but that was where the similarities stopped. It was easy to make him laugh. He was the sort of big boy you just knew his mother would gather up in her lap still, if she could.

Poor, stupid Bobby.

The other couples knew each other, and my boyfriend knew everyone too. They’d all gone to the same university. I was the new girl, the outlier. They were eager to tell me what he was really like. Everyone had a story.

It was a chic crowd. Pant suits, silk slip dresses. Kitten heels. My boyfriend was in jeans and a dress shirt, a happy middle-ground, but I could see I’d fallen behind the other women there. I was in a mini skirt, coloured tights, and a band shirt. I’d worn my winter boots and now I was sock footed, didn’t think to bring shoes. I was the youngest in the room by four years, nothing in my closet looked even remotely as expensive as what they had on. Looking back now, and knowing better, it was probably all Zara.