We were about to place a sparkling silver skull on top of the Christmas tree. None of your traditional angels, fairies or stars here.

She was still so fascinating to me.

I didn’t have a gift in the shape of a ring box to put under the tree. She would never have expected that. It wasn’t us. Maybe one day we would make it official but honestly, we didn’t need anything formal to tell us we were connected to each other. Our tattoos and our history told us that.

I did buy her an ankle bracelet as my own version of a promise ring. It was silver with a small diamond hanging off it. I knew as soon as I saw it in the shop window that it was made to accentuate that sharp, gorgeous anklebone I loved to kiss and had an urge to stroke whenever we lay on the sofa with her legs across me like we’d never been apart.

Things were changing. Elle and Ben were about to move in to their first house together. I had practically moved in with Abi and would be letting my flat go in the next month. Things were good. No! Things were fucking great. Not only had I found my way back to the only woman I’d ever truly loved, I’d also found a great mate in Ben.

I struggled at times with the great pain of loss. Mum and Lily were always balancing on a thought somewhere. With Mum’s loss, I could feel a sense of peace, which was hard to admit, but I felt it so deeply. She was ready.

Lily’s death would never fully rest with me. She wasn’t ready. It wasn’t her time. Her life was just beginning. I’ll never find peace with that.

There were times when the enormity of Lily’s death hit me in waves. At first, I felt I had to hide the tides from Abi. I didn’t need to worry. She accepted the waves and provided the safety away from them.

I kept in touch with Clara with Abi’s full blessing and encouragement. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t awkward between us. I felt Clara still had unresolved feelings about our relationship. Abi said they were justifiably wrapped around her feelings regarding Lily and causing a tangle between the two. She still needed time to pull through the knots.

Abi often explained things in ways I found much easier to understand.

We sent a Christmas card and planned to visit her in the new year. Surprisingly, Abi and Clara kept in regular contact, often texting or emailing to check in with each other. My heart fucking swelled knowing that Abi didn’t hold any grudges. She was amazingly accepting and even though I was knee deep in her already, I couldn’t have loved her more for that.

Our relationship had grown intense very quickly.

We accepted the changes that had happened during the time we were apart. Abi’s reluctance to trust and my intense need to apologise every fucking minute didn’t help us at first, but we eventually owned our mistakes, talked until we fell asleep, and never went to bed when there was an atmosphere bigger than both of us.

One thing we could be certain of was life would always bring challenges, disappointments of various sizes, and differences of opinion—this is Abi we are talking about—spitfire on legs—but the biggest change was taking comfort in knowing we had been through the worst. Anything else that life would throw at us would be a walk in the bloody park.

The hardest thing I had to accept was knowing my actions had led Abi to believe she wasn’t worthy of love and would only consider a relationship based on sex that wouldn’t run for more than a few hours. She was completely honest with me about the men she had slept with, which was painful for a whole stack of reasons. I was sure the issues with her father were also part of the mix, and although I knew I didn’t help her ability to completely trust, I would spend the rest of my life fighting to show her she was my future, my fucking everything.

If someone were to ask me what my best advice would be to the lonely and lost, the people working on second chance love and teetering on rediscovery, my answer would be easy: Claim all past fuck-ups as yours. Don’t make them define you but give them their space on the bench and always respect the power they have. But above everything, trust each other. You know where your relationship could take you…

I had been to amazing places with Abi.

We didn’t have the ability to time travel. Time was constantly moving forward at a frightening pace. I wasn’t able to erase the past or take us back to that amazing moment when I’d spilled coffee down her blouse, but what I could do was gather up the lessons of us, sort them into chapters according to what we had learnt, and then file them away for future reference. Second chances are to be treated like rare and beautiful objects. They need to be nurtured and fearsomely taken care of.

I didn’t think I deserved a second chance, but then I started to consider that our first experience of love only strengthened us and made us appreciate every single moment. The small shallow sighs I could listen to all night as she slept, the handwritten note on the fridge telling me she was going to suck me until I was begging for breath, and the fact that she would never go to bed until I was following her down the hallway.

She was my teammate. The strongest connection I had ever made to another living person in my life. She was back. Back where she always should have been.

Mine. Ours. Together.

Fucking amazing.