I laughed, begrudgingly. My best and oldest friend, stuck somewhere between her former earth-bound self and a new life, floating up and away from self-awareness and a sense of humour, to a place I couldn’t reach her. You don’t get to be both, I wanted to say to her. Which are you, Katherine? A satirist or an arsehole?

We went back to her place for lunch. It was two o’clock and Mark was asleep – it turns out the ‘childcare glitch’ was that he was too hung-over to look after his daughter and she’d had to be taken to Katherine’s mum for the morning. He had rung the doorbell at four a.m. because he was so drunk he couldn’t find his keys, and when Katherine answered the door and told him he had woken up Olive, he replied: ‘Who’s Olive?’ Katherine told the story with a sort of rolly-eyed, boys-will-be-boys joviality she often employed when talking about her husband. Not for the first time upon looking in on my friends’ long-term relationships, I marvelled at how a marriage ironically seemed to provide men of my generation with even more of an excuse to not grow up. When Olive was still a newborn, Mark once spent the day at Twickenham with some colleagues and got so drunk he passed out in a friend’s wardrobe and woke up soaked in his own urine. They still talk about the incident with the warmth of a family anecdote to be passed along the generations. If Katherine had done the same, either social services would have been alerted or at the very least she would have been spoken about as a new mother free-falling into self-destruction and parental neglect. For Mark, it was just a big day out at the rugby.

Mark emerged halfway through our lunch. His ten-quid-at-the-barber standard brown haircut was dishevelled like a schoolboy’s, his chin dusted with stubble. His pale face looked both plump and deflated, like a faulty airbed dragged out from the attic. His small grey eyes were sticky and bloodshot.

‘Big night?’ I asked, the note of judgement in my voice as bright and sonorous as a middle C.

‘A bit, yeah, a bit,’ he said, leaning down to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Was out with Joe.’

‘Oh yeah, what did you guys get up to?’

‘Was meant to be just a few at the pub, but things got a bit out of hand. He ended up losing a bet and eating twenty quid.’

‘Eating it?’

‘Yeah, two ten-pound notes,’ he said, laughing to himself. Katherine shook her head and closed her eyes, in mock dismay. ‘Then he was sick outside the Duck and Crown and he tried to see if he could find the pieces in the vomit and stick the notes back together again to buy another round!’

‘The one that got away,’ I said.

‘We were celebrating his engagement,’ he said pointedly, before getting up to go to the fridge.

‘Did he tell you?’ Katherine asked.

‘Yes, he told me he was going to propose. Then I saw it on Instagram.’ It had been impossible to miss the press-release photo and statement Lucy had issued of the pair of them, like it was news from Clarence House. Mark and Katherine had been the first to like and comment enthusiastically. Married people loved doing this to newly engaged people – it was how I imagined celebrities must reverently nod at each other across a posh restaurant.

‘Has Kat showed you the house?’ Mark boomed from behind the fridge door.

‘No?’

‘Oh,’ she said, reaching for a piece of paper from a drawer in the sideboard. ‘We’ve made an offer.’ She pushed the picture and description of the house towards me.

‘Starting to get really excited about getting out of this hellhole of a city,’ Mark said, transporting a plate of crisps, carrot batons and cocktail sausages to the table along with a giant tub of hummus and a tin of sweetcorn. I longed to point out that he seemed to think this ‘hellhole’ was more than suitable when he wanted to use it as a giant playground to destroy with other fellow man-babies on a Friday night out.

The house description showed a four-bed modern home in a commutable Surrey village, crassly made to look like a red-brick Georgian cottage. The asking price was written in bold at the top, as overblown as the building itself. I thought about how sensitive I had been to Lola when I had bought my tiny one-bed flat, which I knew was something she might never be able to do; how I had hidden the price from her, how I had downplayed the perks of home ownership and reminded her of how freeing renting could be. This was not a courtesy that Katherine felt obliged to show. I could sit an A level in the details of Katherine and Mark’s life together over the last decade. Every asset, every purchase, every detail of their wedding, every potential baby name. Tradition dictates that metamorphoses belong to the married – the rest of us exist in a static state.

‘It looks lovely,’ I lied.

‘It’s got a great garden for the kids,’ Katherine said.

‘So brilliant,’ I said, already running out of adjectives.

‘Joe said you’ve got a new bloke,’ Mark said, using a large crisp as a ladle from which to shove a cocktail sausage in his mouth.

‘Oh yes! How is he?’ Katherine asked.

‘A bloody big bugger, according to Joe!’

‘Joe hasn’t even met him,’ I said.

‘He’s found a photo of him online. Says he looks like Jesus crossed with the Incredible Hulk. He’s seething about it, absolutely seething. It’s hilarious.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

‘Oh, you know him. He’s a loveable but insecure child.’ Mark said this while mashing a dollop of hummus directly into the tin of sweetcorn.

‘When can we meet him?’ Katherine asked.

‘Soon,’ I said. ‘He’s got to meet Joe first.’

‘Can I come watch?’ Mark asked.

I saw Joe a few weeks later. I decided to meet him an hour before Max was due to arrive, to avoid doing a catch-up chat in front of Max and potentially making him feel alienated. We agreed on a centrally located pub, as centrally located pubs are the apolitical socializing territory. Everything had to be as neutral as possible – I could tell that Max felt nervous about spending time with the man who I’d been in my most significant and longest relationship with; a man who was still such an important part of my life and friendship group. And I could tell Joe felt uncomfortable at the thought of potentially being replaced as my most significant relationship. Neither had said so explicitly, but, like so many other times in my life, I had been presented with a man in a muddle of feelings and I had found the correct vocabulary to match it. It was also down to me to manage and marshal those feelings in a way that made them feel as safe and comfortable as possible. Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.

‘How’s wedding planning going?’ I asked Joe, who was wearing the grey denim shirt he had obviously forgotten he’d called his ‘slimming shirt’ for all the years we were together. The buttons strained across him, the dark, downy hair of his belly visible through the gaps.

‘I’ve sort of let Lucy get on with that,’ he said, avoiding my gaze by staring into his pint. ‘She’s really got the eye for design, you know?’

There’s nothing I loved more than watching a man merrily surrender to full-blown emasculation via wedding planning. ‘When’s it going to be?’

‘Spring.’

‘Wow, that’s fast.’

‘Yeah. I’ve got something I want to ask you.’

‘No, I won’t marry you, you should have asked me when you had the chance.’

‘Nina.’

‘Sorry.’

‘As you know, you’re a very important person in my life. Probably the most important person in my life, other than Lucy.’

‘Right,’ I said, uncomfortable with this unusual tone of sincerity from Joe.

‘And Lionel Messi!’ he said, with a nervous chuckle.

‘Okay.’

‘Anyway, I want you to be a part of the wedding. Originally, I thought I’d ask you to do a reading, but I know you’d find it cheesy, and I also want you to be there with me the morning of.’

‘Right.’

‘Will you be one of my ushers?’

‘Yes!’ I said, relieved that I wouldn’t have to stand at a lectern in a pastel-coloured dress I’d never wear again bleating ‘love is patient, love is kind’ for the 754th time in my life. ‘I’d love that. It would be an honour. Oh, Joe, that’s so lovely of you. Do I get to wear a suit?’

‘Yes. Or whatever you like.’

‘Can I come to the piss-up the night before?’

‘Yes! You can stay in the pub with me and the best man and the other ushers.’

‘And can I come to the stag?’

‘Er, no, actually.’

‘What?!’

‘I know, I know, it’s a bummer,’ he said. ‘But it’s Lucy’s one request. She’s fine with you being usher, but she doesn’t want you on the stag do.’

‘Why not?’

‘Nina, my future wife is letting me stay in the room next door to my ex-girlfriend the night before my wedding because I need you for emotional support. I think she’s being very understanding. I think we should give her this.’

‘Okay,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I can’t wait, Joe. I’ll do the best ushering you’ve ever seen.’

‘Will Max be okay with it, do you think? He’ll be invited, of course.’

‘Oh, definitely,’ I said. ‘He likes that we’re so close. He thinks exes being friends is elegant.’