By the time Adam and Maisie find her back at the hotel, curled up and shivering under the duvet, she has showered the worst of the vomit away. They fuss and flap over swollen eyes and pale skin and dry lips. Time to get you home, one of them says in motherly tones. Adam calls for Matthew’s car to drive them home, forgoing their planned second night at the hotel.

She falls asleep on the way back and wakes in her own bed, early the next morning – disorientated and hot, under layers of blankets. The morning light is still low and the birds are waking at once quietly, and then loud – their songs tumbling and bumping into each other. She has the sense that her body has become unmoored in space and yet, in time? She is more clearly orientated than she ever remembers being: the day she has been holding off is here now. At the office they will think she is still on holiday so for the meantime she is safe to go about her business unquestioned. So long as she is careful.

The house smells of fresh laundry – Adam must have hung a load that night after their return. She finds him curled up like a guard dog at the foot of her bed on a blow-up mattress.

Silently, so silently – she must be careful not to wake him – she folds back the duvet, skin bristling with early morning cold. The reflection she catches in the mirror is smudged and tangled, hair standing on end like field stubble, but her skin shines white and her eyes are bright. The person she sees is both someone she recognizes and someone she has not seen before.

Her toes bend softly on the floorboards as she makes her way toward the doorway but she stops a moment before leaving, turning to see the shape his face makes.

Adam would have had such a different life without her. He might have travelled to South East Asia and Australia. He might now be married with a baby, be on his third business enterprise, instead of paying two sets of utility bills and visiting a family he doesn’t live with, loyally servicing a sixteen-year-old lie.

She no longer wants him to make sacrifices for her. She wants him to be free.

She wants to be free.

Enough, now.

On the bus into the city, sitting with her eyes closed, she can smell the dry cleaning chemicals of skirts and jackets whipped out of their polythene body-bags, and the cloying hand-washing florals of silken City shirts, and body odour, and perfume, and stale shoes.