I thought I knew what it was. I thought he was thinking about that morning at the manor, out on the drive in the snow. The body. The cold hands. As he tore his gaze from mine and stumbled away, it seemed like an admission of an accusation I hadn’t been able to whisper, not even to myself.

I had every intention of going to the office and being productive for a few hours. Afterward, at home, I would treat myself to dinner in bed in my tights where I would lose myself in news websites, celebrity gossip, in the scroll, the Wiki trails, the image parade, the sly, beckoning click bait. But I didn’t go to work and I didn’t go home, not straightaway. Perhaps because it was a Friday, and the prospect of the whole weekend ahead unnerved me to a greater extent than I was willing to admit. I got close, as far as the bar two streets away, where I sat in a corner and ordered the first glass of wine, discussing my choice with the bartender as though I actually cared what it was. He promised me notes of passion fruit and kiwi, something slightly oily with an almost maritime finish. It could have been turpentine. I wanted a tunnel deeper and blacker than the screen could provide, no matter the consequences. I wanted escape, and my body, although part of what I wanted to escape, was also the means.

At five the bar began to fill. At the next table, a girl said something and her friends cried out that it was her, so her, to say what she had said. But even personality seemed to me a game, and she was being congratulated for getting it right, the performance of herself. I sat there drinking with the telephone box still in its plastic bag on the seat beside me. Sometime around the third glass of wine it came: the roar in the blood. A soaring feeling of excitement, the promise of change, the sense I was leaving behind what I knew. Strength. Power. Recklessness. A lurking knowledge, that alcohol didn’t make everyone feel this way.

I got my phone out and went from app to app. By the time I realized I should eat, the kitchen was closed, so I ordered more wine and four or five packets of bar snacks, fancy ones with rosemary and glazing and sea salt, and a joker at the next table thought he’d ask me if I was enjoying those. Possibly he meant it in a friendly way, but I paused in the shoveling to stare into his eyes, so the smile slid right off his face. Then, at some point, I went on LinkedIn and sent a reckless message, before taking up a stool at the bar.