The builder and I are done with Surrey

As he grouted the last tile, five years after the bathroom was finished, I knew the game was up.

‘I guess this is it,’ I said, as the builder boyfriend used a filler gun to bring about closure.

This single ungrouted tile where the bath meets the wall has been something of a symbolic fight between the two of us. It baffled and infuriated me until I simply gave up wondering and made my peace with it.

I plastered it with Hippo tape, thinking that would shame him, but it didn’t. Why he stopped short of an otherwise perfect job two seconds short of completion, he never did explain.

I came to various conclusions about the psychology of the ungrouted tile. I decided that whatever it meant, it went to the heart of our relationship. Solve the mystery of the ungrouted tile and you solve the mystery of the builder boyfriend and me.

Did he fear that I would no longer need him if he grouted that tile, that I might throw all his belongings out on to the street? Did some abandonment issue from his childhood make him withhold ten centimetres of grout in some sort of bid for security?

Or perhaps this small gap was a private joke, something he kept for himself in this eternal trampling of boundaries we call a relationship.

We have often said, however, that the last tile will have to be grouted if we ever decide to move on from this house. And so when he marched into the bathroom with a filler gun, I said: ‘Is this really it? Are we really going to make this happen? A big old farmhouse and land, and us living in the middle of nowhere with the dogs and the horses?’ And he said: ‘Yes.