She feels inside her pockets for her tools: for the empty and folded, gum-edged envelope, flat and clean and ready to be filled. For the nail scissors: nicely sharp at one end, handles smooth and round as a child’s rattle the other, ready to be used. She has cleaned them. They are the same scissors she must stop cutting herself with.

She grasps her phone tight in her palm and checks her social media feeds every minute. Refresh, refresh, refresh, until she knows exactly where she is going.

Scott always posts what he eats for breakfast, and where. If he does repeat a breakfast choice – Variety isn’t always possible, even for the most organized – he’ll be sure to include some life advice like Smile, and the world smiles with you! He likes to treat himself with positivity and kindness. He calls it self-care, like it’s something he invented. These are the posts that make Becky want to hurl her phone through a window, because she hates the freedom of it. It is not a freedom that should belong to him. It has been paid for, day after day after day, as she sublimated and ignored and blamed herself for his crime.

This morning he has cared for himself by going for an open water swim in Hampstead Ponds. Hashtag-blessed and fuck you, she thinks. And then he has further self-cared with a ‘good breakfast’ of almond milk flat white and acai granola. Picture: spoon half in, half out, glazed pottery bowl, sunshine, a café next to his office called cafffine, whose sign is totally Instagrammable what with the white Courier font on black background and their triple-F logo.

She gets off the bus and walks at pace. Checks her phone. A post, two minutes ago: Second coffee of the morning. Too addicted, but I need a vice!

She waits across the road. Leans against a red-brick wall. Some foul dark liquid has pooled and is drying in a treacling mass where the brickwork meets the pavement.

She sees Scott emerge from the café.

He was worn his duck-egg-blue trousers. Leather satchel, latest phone, the best hair – one coffee just isn’t enough for a man with such an appetite for fashion and caffeine and other people’s bodies.

She hates him and is a little afraid of him.

She feels unprepared for how quickly his digital pixel existence has become him in flesh and blood.

She tells herself, come on. This will be an end to not knowing, an end to never being certain. She needs to hear him tell her what happened.