‘Well, if you were so unhappy, why didn’t you say something?’ she finds herself yelling.

‘I did! Or at least I tried. But you just wouldn’t listen. The same way you never listen.’ He’s clearly appalled, as if he cannot fathom how they have come to this. ‘You get these ideas in your head and they just stick – they won’t budge. Notions you nurse that grow inside you with no basis in reality. You’re a fantasist, Hilary. And you’re just so fucking obsessive!’

She’s crying again, silently now, the pain blooming in her chest.

‘My heart is broken,’ she tells him.

He’s standing above her, and for just a fleeting moment, the look on his face turns to pity. ‘Let me guess,’ he says softly, ‘you threw yourself at him and he knocked you back.’

She sniffs, and she hears him exhale.

He goes to the window, puts two hands to the sill to steady himself. ‘Well, let that be an end to it, then.’

His words are breathed out at the glass, and she looks up. He meets her gaze, his voice hardening: ‘Do you hear me? Just let it go!’

‘I can’t! I can’t just turn it off. Love doesn’t just end like that!’

‘Love?’ He is aghast. ‘That isn’t love! It’s a twisted obsession with a dead woman!’

It takes a moment for the words to sink in.

He moves to the bed, collapses on to it, exhausted.

‘A dead woman?’ she asks, confused. ‘Charlotte?’

‘Of course Charlotte. Who else?’

‘I’m not obsessed with her!’

‘Dear God, you’ve been obsessed with her from the moment you first met!’

She’s too startled to speak. If there was any obsession, it was with Anton. But Greg is talking again and she struggles to follow, listening as he details those few months they’d spent living in the basement of Number 14.

‘You couldn’t stop talking about her. Always going on about some dress she was wearing and how much it must have cost. Or the way she allowed the kids to run around the garden screaming without intervening. Or how she idled away the hours reading magazines or playing the piano. It was non-stop.’

Hilary doesn’t answer. Too bewildered to speak, her mind racing. Was it true what he said?

‘And all the questions – Jesus! Did I think she was attractive? Would I call her beautiful or just pretty? If I met her at a party and I wasn’t married, would I fancy my chances? When she put her hand on my knee that evening, was I tempted?’ His voice gains strength as he runs through the litany of questions she had plagued him with. Distantly, they ring a bell, a chime of recognition. A cold feeling is crawling up and over her neck and shoulders.

‘And then you started emulating her,’ Greg says, snapping her attention back to him.