Tara’s interview didn’t start well. It didn’t end well, and there was a period in the middle where she thought it might be going all right, but it turned out she’d been waxing lyrical about talking therapies when in fact the earnest male trustee had asked her about Tolkien therapy. Which she hadn’t even heard of.

After forty-five minutes of painful limping around the hypothetical management situations, Jacqueline asked if Tara had any questions for them, and the only thing that came into her mind was, Please can I go now?

In the last-choice cafe down the street from the Wellness Centre, Tara stared bleakly into her collapsing cappuccino. That had been, without doubt, the worst interview of her life, but weirdly, she felt nothing.

Something Tara’s supervisor had told her early on in her training kept running across her mind like breaking news: ‘Numbness doesn’t mean you’re feeling no emotion, it means you’re feeling too much emotion. You’re flooded.’

Tara knew that was true. Finally, she was overloaded. Her brain was silted up with toxic emotions like guilt and shame and resentment and …

‘Oh God,’ she said aloud, and rested her eyes on the heels of her palms until everything went a comforting black. She hated interviews, but she’d never failed one before.

Tara could tell Jacqueline was disappointed with her performance. Surprised and disappointed, that double-edged schoolteacher reaction. She’d blanked the names of the other two board members sitting on either side of her: the serious man who wrote down everything she said, and a woman with pink hair who stared at her without blinking, as if waiting for Tara to say a trigger word she could pounce on.

The waitress had already circled her table once, checking she wasn’t crying by wiping the tables around her. She didn’t want to get into a conversation about why her mascara looked like this.

Tara made herself sip her coffee to show the waitress she was fine, and stared out through the window. The rain was relentless. People were hurrying down the high street with umbrellas, their flimsy summer clothes covered up with anoraks resentfully dug out of cupboards. August, so-called high summer, and it was more like October out there, wet and grey and mean. This wasn’t summer, thought Tara, not like the turquoise sea and sun-bleached sand of Toby’s Instagram account.

In a funny way, thought Tara, at least this unmitigated disaster took one decision out of her hands. There would be no salary-based mortgage now. No mortgage meant no way of giving Toby his half of the house, so Wye Villa would have to be sold. Even though she was still mad at Toby, Tara had decided she couldn’t not give him his half. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t. She certainly couldn’t maintain her comfortable position on the moral high ground.