She’d almost wanted him to ask if there was someone new. Nearly anyone else would have done that. But James hadn’t; he’d just kept talking, as if there was still something to play for, as if he could still hold onto her. Asking how he could fix it. How it could still be all right.

‘I know I’m not very good at expressing things without sounding silly,’ he’d said – Michaela couldn’t even meet his eye; she stared at her wine-glass, which she was holding so tightly at the stem she feared it would snap. She thought of Phillip, against every good instinct in her body, thought of how soon she could see him and this would be over. ‘This is going to sound silly,’ James continued. ‘But you’re the only person I have ever loved this way. Please don’t take away … what we have. I’m begging you not to do that. We can solve this, whatever it is.

‘You can’t … I mean. You can’t, you mustn’t leave me just because I shouted at you. That one time. It doesn’t make sense, Michaela.’

But of course it hadn’t been about the one time. It had been made of a lot of different little things, just like suddenly huge problems always were. Part of it was the way that she’d begun to feel trapped by the whole running project. If you didn’t post something every twenty minutes, people started getting at you. ‘I pay to subscribe to this!’ If you did post, you got the usual internet pond life sneering at you for being fat, but if in a video she looked even slightly thinner than usual, she’d get plus-size fans making out that she was ‘a bad ambassador’, that she’d sold out, like all of them did when they started making money.