Most mornings, after I’d done my chores, I rode down to the beachfront on my bike. One day I ventured into an organic market and bought some vegetables for our pozole. Another day I visited a bird sanctuary where I lost myself to the beauty of hundreds of parakeets, quetzals, toucans, white ibis and vultures and a tiny hummingbird who drank sugar water from my cupped hand. It was probably trained to do that but still, it was a happy moment I’d remember forever.

IKR? It’s all getting a bit Julia Roberts, isn’t it? But I swear, that’s how it was. It’s like my birthday had heralded a new era – an era where I chose to be happy, no matter what else was happening. It was a rebirth-day, you might say.

I visited a sculpture garden and an aloe vera plantation, as well as more of the museums, shops and art galleries I’d only previously walked past but had never gone inside on my own.

I ate freshest calamares tempura, fig and arugula salad and tuna carpaccio at the seaside cantinas, drank the rummiest piña coladas, and collected handfuls of tiny white shells in the cool waters of the Sea of Cortez at the end of a long hot day. And it was great coming home and telling Tenoch, bringing him little gifts – shell necklaces I’d watched being made, tacos from street vendors, and a little craft gatita – a handmade yarn kitten with black-and-white stripes, blue button eyes and a smiling mouth that I thought he would like.

‘I love it. My little gatita, just like you.’

Mexico gave me freedom and a friend and it made me like the world again. I liked myself again. My killing urge all but disappeared, but not in an unsettling way like it had aboard the cruise – in a natural way. I was nourished. Bedded into Rocas Calientes like one of my plants. Fed, watered, appreciated. No need for this Venus flytrap to bite.

One evening, I hung around Playa Tortuga – the beach – reading a book beneath my usual palapa and soaking in the last vestiges of sun with a fresh piña colada. ‘I so don’t deserve this,’ I chuckled to myself – the realisation had dawned as the sun went down. I was in fucking paradise when, by rights, I should have been in jail.

A party had started up on a hotel terrace. A family danced and laughed, spinning themselves around a dancefloor surrounded by large umbrellas decked in fairy lights. Some children spilled out of the throng and scampered down the steps, all crowding around an iPad. I crunched up the seashells I’d collected, breathing in the salt and smoke air, trying to ignore the hubbub but it kept filtering through my consciousness. One of the kids, a boy with long eyelashes framing his chestnut-brown eyes, came running over to see what I was holding.