Instinctively I put my hand out to reach for my phone to call Sean, forgetting that I don’t have one any more. I need to find him. Only he can help me make sense of all this. Then I remember Claire saying how she had tried to call him and his number had been disconnected. So even if I had a phone I still wouldn’t be able to contact him.

‘Sean,’ I cry, slamming my fists down on the stiff bedcovers. ‘Where are you?’

I see a piece of paper on the other side of the bed. It’s the list that I made last night. I reach over and hold it in my hands. I turn the paper over and see the names I’d written down, the friends and acquaintances who may know where Sean is. But as I read through my jumbled handwriting I realize that the chances of Sean being with any of these people are remarkably slim. The truth is, Sean and I were quite private people. Like me, he was an only child. He never knew his dad and his mum had died from breast cancer just before we met. We used to say we were two lost orphans who had found each other. We had friends, people from the village, parents from the school, but we kept them at a distance. We only needed each other.

I turn over in the bed and as a sliver of golden light trickles through the gap in the curtains I think back to the day I met him.

I was thirty-one years old and working as a receptionist for an asset management company in London, just by Waterloo Station. My days were spent sitting behind a giant glass desk, doling out visitor passes to grey-faced suits, booking meeting rooms and making coffee. It was soul-destroying but it paid reasonably well and for someone like me, who had thrown any chance of a decent career away over a decade earlier, it was a solid job.