Hi Charlie. Have had to leave flat. Suspected gas leak. Why don’t you go back to yours and I’ll text you with the all-clear later?

I agonised over whether to put a kiss at the end. If I didn’t, she would definitely know something was up. I decided to add a couple. What harm could it do? As soon as the police went to talk to her she would know I had been lying anyway.

She texted back a minute later. Oh, OK. What a nightmare. See you later. xx

I went to a coffee shop and sat at a table on the pavement, embracing the cold. I felt utterly miserable, more unhappy than at any time since my parents had died. It felt like all my emotions had been put into a spin dryer which was churning and tossing them around inside me. I didn’t know it was actually physically possible for a heart to ache, but right now, mine did.

I had just lost the woman I loved, the woman who had made me so happy over the last couple of months. Regardless of what she’d done, I loved her. You can’t turn your feelings off like a tap. Love doesn’t die like that. Look at all those husbands and wives who stand by their spouses even after they’ve been found guilty of the most terrible crimes. Picture the mother who stands by her murderer son. Even if they know their spouse or offspring is guilty, even if it goes against everything they believe to be right and decent, they still love them. Love is hard to break. Adultery, violence, betrayal, cruelty. Love can survive them all. Although I didn’t expect Charlie’s love for me would survive what I’d done. She had, I believed, committed murder. But, in a way, my crime against her was even worse. I’d betrayed her behind her back.

I missed my girlfriend. I wanted to erase the last couple of weeks, to go back. I had a kind of waking dream in which Charlie and I were lying in bed, her head on my chest, talking to me, laughing, and the only other sound I could hear was the rain beating against the window.

‘You all right, mate?’

I looked up. One of the baristas from the coffee shop was looking at me with a mix of concern and amusement. And who could blame him? I was sitting in the middle of a downpour, the rain lashing down on me, drenching my skin and hair, plopping into my coffee. I hadn’t even noticed.

I went to Sasha’s, sat outside on the steps till she got home. Luckily, the rain had stopped.

She took one look at me and said, ‘Andrew? What the fuck’s happened?’

‘Can I come in? I’ll tell you all about it.’