No wonder I made a quick getaway. I’ve learnt the hard way not to believe in that look. Pete used to gaze at me the same way: make me feel as if I were special. And believing him, I opened up my fragile heart – the one I’ve guarded so carefully since childhood – and let him tear it apart.

Pete asked me to marry him once after a work party. I never told my friends about his proposal. I never told anyone. Mostly, I’m confident I did the right thing, as he’d been drinking tequila all night, but every now and again I let myself consider what it would have been like to say yes. I loved him enough. I wanted to have his babies and grow old and wrinkly with him by my side. But I couldn’t say yes. Not when I knew he didn’t mean it.

He’d stopped giving me that special look a few months earlier. About the same time I noticed his eyes seemed to be elsewhere. The day he told me he was moving to Sydney for work was also the day he confessed he’d slept with someone else. He felt he couldn’t leave without letting me know the truth. It was no one I knew, he’d said, as if this somehow made things better. And it was only the once, that’s all. That’s all, I’d screamed, the first time in my life I’d let my emotions get the better of me. Then I’d thrown the glass I’d been holding at his head.

It hit him on the cheek and landed on the floor with a smash. Pete held a hand to his bleeding face in shock, but there was also a hint of something else in his expression. Was it smugness? Was he pleased to see the unflappable, in-control Trish snap finally? Is it ironic that he then told me the reason he’d strayed was because he’d grown frustrated with my lack of emotion? I never cried or yelled. Pete said he felt like I was silently judging him, waiting for him to mess things up.

Maybe I did hold back a little. I loved him so much, but it was never a love free of fear. I doubted him because I doubted the whole concept of love.

Slipping off my sandals, I slowly wander down the path, enjoying the sensation of the cold concrete on my hot and swollen feet. Normally I wouldn’t be caught dead walking around in bare feet, but right now I can’t see anyone and it’s liberating to realize how little I care.

“Trish!”

I turn to see Scott running towards me. He stops a good metre away.

“Hey,” he murmurs.

“Hi.”