When the house was sold, I was left with a small sum, after debts and other fees had been accounted for. I should have bought a modest property, invested in my future, but nobody had ever taught me how to handle money properly and in many ways I was still a naive fourteen-year-old girl, locked in a state of arrested development. So instead of getting on the property ladder I spent the last few years of my twenties on a mad spending spree. I got expensive haircuts and shopped on Bond Street. I started to wear make-up and would think nothing of buying a scented candle for two hundred quid. I moved to London and spent a fortune renting a tiny flat in Battersea. It would have been cheaper to flat-share but my past experiences had left me distrustful of others. Home was my refuge, a place I could go back to each night, close the door and shut out the world. I worked in a series of admin jobs, usually front of house, where I could sit and read novels in between having to answer phones and make coffee. It was like I was a teenager again, only instead of lying on my bed, reading books and blocking out the world, I was sitting behind a desk doing the same. One of my bosses, a woman called Helen, once caught me reading a novel when I should have been preparing a meeting room for an important conference. I thought she would go ballistic and sack me for neglecting my duties but she sat down and asked a bit about me, about my past, where I’d grown up, where I’d gone to school. When I told her about my lack of education, she urged me to go back to college, perhaps enrol on a literature course and put the reading to good use. But I was too scared. Doing that would mean facing up to everything that had happened, opening up hopes and aspirations that I’d long since buried. No, I was happier to block it all out by sitting behind one dreary reception desk after the other. Better to be numb than to have my heart broken again. But then I met Sean and everything changed. He gave my life meaning. He gave me Elspeth.

And now they are gone.

The piece of paper with the list of names I compiled yesterday sits redundantly on the bedside table, my search for Sean put on hold until I get a new phone. We were supposed to go and buy one today but the encounter with Barbara left me so shaken I couldn’t face staying in town. Sonia said she would pick one up for me tomorrow. She promised she’d get the cheapest model she could find. But even then, the £198 I have in my account is not going to last long.