But there was no fun in that thought, now, any more than there was in the memory of her playful early arguments with Phillip. Nothing made sense, and Michaela didn’t feel in a state of mental fitness to deal even with things that did make sense. Of course not. It was five in the morning. They’d been drinking. She should be asleep. She should not be trying to talk James down from this. From this mad but increasingly plausible threat. And not even talking to him, just sending messages into nothingness. She’d texted him six times, tried to call four. Each time, part of her instinct had been that he surely must answer this time. When they were together – and especially when they’d begun working together, too – he’d barely left it as long as the second tone if her name came up. Can I help with anything, love? Are you sure you don’t want me to …? The almost comical devotion, which had been so lovely until it started to feel very slightly like a bind, and to which she ultimately preferred the cat-and-mouse game of Phillip’s erratic phone etiquette. So she had thought.

She looked helplessly at the phone held out in front of her, and at her own knees rising from the water, reflected in the elegant silver tap. She was sitting up almost straight against the back of the bath; she might as well be in an office chair. She remembered being in the old place, in London, sitting like this – bolt upright, the water going cold – on the night she’d admitted to herself that she was going to have to leave James.

Michaela had reconstructed it meticulously with her therapist. That awful night, a night (like this one) that had seemed never-ending, preceded by bad sleeps and followed by no sleep at all. Couldn’t stop crying; clown-like smudges all over her face. And James, who was the one who would have had the right to cry, James keeping it together, just asking: ‘What can I do to change your mind? What can I do to be better – for the relationship to be better?’ Because she hadn’t told him about Phillip yet, which she later hated herself for. (Although the therapist said ‘hating yourself’ was unsustainable, and could we find another way of talking about it?) ‘I’m so sorry, James,’ she’d kept saying, aware how absolutely inadequate it was, particularly as he didn’t fully realize what she was apologizing for. ‘I’m so sorry, my darling.’ Not just for leaving, but loving someone else, more than she loved James, even though that made her a terrible person. (The therapist had said it wasn’t constructive to label herself like that, and was there a different way of talking about it?)