Waking up every morning to live another day without Yara was always a shock. Surviving each individual minute was gruelling. But knowing that at 10 p.m. I could stop enduring and disappear into delicious oblivion gave me strength.

The only thing was, it didn’t take much to build up a tolerance to the pills. So it was no real surprise that after a week or so of taking them, I began waking after five hours, then four. For a couple of nights I tried waiting it out, hoping to go back to sleep, but it was hard, especially knowing there was a small stash of pills nearby, rolled into a pair of socks in my chest of drawers. On the third night, I tiptoed over and tried to pull out the drawer without making a noise. But with a squeak, the wood caught and Luke shifted in the bed.

‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled.

‘Nothing,’ I whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

I pressed the pill from the card, placed it on my tongue, slipped back into bed and soon I was carried off to pain-free nothingness.

After that night, I kept a second tablet hidden in my pillowcase for when I woke at 2 or 3 a.m.

In an awful development, daytimes seemed to be becoming more painful. It was about seven weeks since she’d died, the initial devastation had shifted and the full weight of my—our—loss was starting to settle. Instead of the wide-open expanse of love and happiness Luke and I had been primed for, the life we were left with seemed small, stunted and very sad.

Then he went through a spell of insomnia. After one morning too many when I woke to find him hollow-eyed and exhausted, I suggested he go to Carlotta. My hope was that if we were both taking sleeping pills, he’d understand how helpful they were—and I could tell him I was still taking them.

But he said, ‘I’ll just tough it out. Your sleeping got back to normal.’ Then, ‘Didn’t it?’

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought his eyes flicked to my sock drawer and I went cold. If he found out about them, he’d make me throw them away and I couldn’t—they were the saving of me.

When he left for work, I gave it twenty minutes, just to make sure he wasn’t coming back to catch me, then I retrieved my precious little stockpile—three cards, twenty-seven pills remaining. They needed to be broken up and hidden around the apartment, so that if Luke found some, at least there would still be plenty left.

As I cut the cards into quarters, I felt ashamed, then resentful. Why did he have to be so difficult? If only he’d take on board that this was a very temporary thing and as soon as I was stronger, I’d stop.