So we’re out eating burritos at this place in Soho when I look up and see a woman at the bar. She looks exactly like Martha King, a girl I sort of knew once. I lean forwards and say to Jack, ‘There’s someone over there who looks just like this girl I went to school with. She was kind of a bitch, actually. One of those mean girls.’

‘Hmm,’ he says, his mouth full. ‘Where?’

I gesture with my eyebrows and he looks over his shoulder.

‘Don’t be so obvious!’ I say. Then, my voice lower: ‘Blonde. In the blue dress.’ ‘Ah,’ he says, interested. ‘Blonde in blue, huh.’

I whack his arm gently. ‘Knock it off. She was awful to me.’

‘Okay.’ He cups his hand under his chin to catch a drip of salsa verde, ‘But you know it’s probably not her, right?’

I weigh up the likelihood. I live two hundred miles away from where I went to school.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘No; you’re right. It’s just weird. She looks like her.’

‘Only twenty-odd years older,’ Jack adds.

‘Something like that,’ I say.

‘What did she do to you anyway?’

Martha was queen bee of a group of girls who called themselves The Beautiful People. They tied their tee-shirts in knots above their midriffs and were mean to anyone they considered ugly. Until I was sixteen, my mother didn’t let me wax my upper lip or my legs. The Beautiful People called me Wolf Girl and threw their heads back and howled every time they saw me. I haven’t thought about any of this for years but it surprises me how in an instant everything comes back so viscerally and suddenly I feel my eyes sting and all my old crappy insecurities again.

‘Oh,’ I sniff. ‘Teenage girl stuff.’

Jack sips his drink. ‘Ah, well,’ he says. ‘Bygones be bygones.’ Something about the way he says this irritates me. He wonders out loud if the twins are asleep. We look at our phones to check for updates. I wonder when we became that kind of couple, only able to talk about our kids. My mother is babysitting; it’s our two-year anniversary. It was her idea that we go out; otherwise, it would have passed us by. She worries we are too laid back in our marriage.

As a joke, I sent Jack a link to an article about romantic restaurants in London to (and I quote) ‘turn up the heat’, all expensive places in Mayfair and Knightsbridge. He thought I was serious and replied: ‘That’s not really us though, is it?’ Though I was joking, when I read his reply, I thought: would it kill him, to make an effort, just once, for me? Why could it not be us?

It surprised me, the harshness of my reaction. I’m the one who insists we keep things low-key, avoid clichés like Valentine’s Day. I’m the one who says I hate big gestures and surprises. In the early days, he said how nice it was to be with someone undemanding; his previous girlfriends had been somewhat high maintenance. The burrito place was his suggestion. I mean… burritos? Sometimes I am not sure if I say that I don’t expect anything to let him off the hook or to save myself from disappointment.

Stylist Short Stories: read Beautiful People by Huma Qureshi