In those glimpses, everything appeared exactly as it should be: beautiful and bad; painful and good. Wanting things to be different would change nothing. I’d been given what I’d been given and my only job was acceptance.

…But there were other times when I went on Kallie Lampart’s Insta, poring over every post, looking for clues about Luke and her.

I had an ally in Claire, which wasn’t necessarily healthy. This became clear the day after my return from Romania, at Molly’s birthday tea party. Claire, in a performatively over-starched “garden party” type of dress, greeted me with cucumber sandwiches and a cheery, ‘Three weeks since the last photo of him and a horse!’

‘What’s this now?’ Helen’s antennae had pricked up. She lumbered towards us, her hand on her lower back, as if she were two years pregnant instead of fourteen weeks.

‘Nothing.’ I was hasty. She had nothing nice to say about Luke. Ever.

But, too late, Claire was explaining, then Helen was scrutinizing Kallie’s grid.

‘Costello doesn’t like having his photo taken, that’s obvious,’ she said. ‘But there’s nothing here to say they’re not together. This Kallie is a Tragic who’d post a shit ton of “Me and my gal pals out drinking strawberry daiquiris” whenever she gets dumped—’

‘You know nothing about her,’ I protested.

‘I’m only pregnant,’ Helen declared hotly, ‘not blind! The evidence here says she’s still Costello’s girl.’

The thought made me want to cry. ‘They’re probably out on his deck,’ I admitted. ‘Smoking hash, dancing to the Doobie Brothers, having a great old time.’

‘The Doobie Brothers?’ Helen was already googling. ‘Who are they?’

Next thing, her phone was playing ‘Long Train Runnin’’, attracting startled looks from across the garden.

‘Fuck, yeah!’ Helen was in stitches. ‘I can so see Costello out there, grooving away to this shit.’

Don’t say that. Please.

But later, when almost everyone had left, she took me aside. ‘I shouldn’t have said Costello is still with that Tragic. I was trying to be tough for you, but that wasn’t what you wanted?’

‘Well, I—’

‘Thing is, I…yeah…tend to hold a grudge.’

No kidding.

‘You say you relapsed and it wasn’t his fault he left you. That’s too complicated for me.’

‘Okaaaay.’

‘Here’s the facts: I enjoy grudges, I don’t like giving up on them. But even though I’m an excellent private investigator, I can’t be sure what’s going on with the pair of them. Those photos could be misleading. Rachel, I…I apologize.’

An apology from Helen was quite the event. But it made no difference because I was accepting it was time for me to move on.