THE ONE WHO MOVED AWAY

VIDEO CALL TIME: TWO HOURS, 45 MINS

Out of all my past friendships, Fiona is the person I feel most nervous about reconnecting with. What if she rejects me? What if her version of events is different from mine? Then she answers. We talk very briefly about how we’re finding lockdown, but it seems we can’t wait to get to the bigger, scary stuff. ‘I can’t believe this happened to us,’ Fiona says. ‘You’re one of the most important people in my life

– we weren’t supposed to drift apart.’ I remind Fiona of that conversation we’d had at the end of our Thailand trip. She remembers it with the same clarity I do.

‘You could still move,’ she jokes.

Not long after I returned from that trip, I met the man who’s now my husband, so I stayed in London. I became tangled in a web of self-doubt over why Fiona and I had stopped talking. I realise now that, in the back of my mind, I’d always held on to the hope that she’d come ‘home’, rather than building a life without me in a different time zone. But the move was for her; it wasn’t about me or our friendship. How easily we picked up where we left off tells me that it could never have been anything but distance that kept us apart. She was destined to come back into my life, and now that we’ve reconnected,

I won’t let her leave again.