It wasn’t like Evie hadn’t been trying to stay positive. To put all this Chloe nonsense behind her. But she felt haunted by Hugo’s ex. Chloe was like an irritable stone in her shoe which she couldn’t quite kick. Evie found herself looking over her shoulder when she walked home, and doublechecking that the doors were locked before she went to bed. Evie knew she was being paranoid—Hugo had assured her that she wasn’t in any danger—but still, she felt Chloe’s presence lurking in the shadows wherever she went.

In an attempt to regain some control, Evie found herself checking Chloe’s Facebook and Instagram pages at least three or four times a day. Finding these accounts in the first place had been no mean feat. Every single Hearst had, in an unusually supportive familial pact, defriended Chloe, so she’d had to click through Hugo’s schoolfriend’s wife’s book club page in order to locate her. And Chloe wasn’t even very active on social media, so her daily searches usually left Evie feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.

But that didn’t stop Evie from checking Chloe’s accounts like a jealous ex herself. On the way to work at the cinema, while crammed in the back corner of the bus between a large man with suffocatingly bad body odour and another who thought he had his headphones plugged in, but didn’t, Evie slipped out her phone and clicked into Chloe’s Facebook profile again. As the bus came to a halt, she squeezed herself out onto the footpath and walked down the street, all the while scrolling through Chloe’s Facebook feed. A smiling Chloe, with her gaze facing out at the person taking the photo, held a takeaway coffee and bouquet of blush peonies wrapped in an old newspaper. Evie was captivated by her fresh, open expression. She clicked on the photo and saw that it had been uploaded two and a half years ago. She wondered whether the photographer had been Hugo and made a mental note to buy more fresh flowers for the house.

She pushed open the heavy doors of the cinema, waving hello to the pair of teenagers manning the ticket booth, decked out in matching vintage red-and-black pillbox hats and double-breasted jackets complete with large, gold buttons.

Evie slipped behind the counter, clocked on and began her shift. In between scooping popcorn, pouring soft drinks and gossiping with Josie, Evie continued her Chloe stalking. She wanted to know everything she could about her, to find out if there was anything else that she was missing, that Hugo hadn’t told her.