“I’ve got another call coming in,” he says. “Ring me properly tomorrow night.” And then he’s gone and I can breathe again.

Back at the house, I settle at Leah’s desk and begin my painstaking research into her life. I start a list, written in tiny little letters in the middle of a notebook I sometimes use for work. I’ll need to commit it all to memory and then destroy it, but for now the act of pen on paper is soothing. I already had a good handle on the persona, the smile she wore in public, the woman with the fake array of books behind her when she spoke to the press and the writers’ magazines, convincing them she had more material to put out when I knew she was incapable of stringing more than a few sentences together. The first book had been the combined efforts of my English degree, a ghostwriter paid handsomely to keep schtum, and a hell of a lot of luck. But I need to know the private Leah, who she was when the door was closed and the camera was switched off. How much of the old Leah she had retained when no one was watching?

She has three email accounts: one for “Leah Patterson” and used for what she called “work,” one for “Leah P” for personal things, and the final one in the name “Heather Taylor.” My breath catches in my throat. Heather Taylor is the name of Chris’s PA. A friendly, middle-aged woman who spent over an hour at his office Christmas party last year telling me about her daughters’ GCSE and A-level exam results. Leah must have borrowed the alias so I’d never suspect what was going on, even if I’d done a little snooping. Which I hadn’t, but now I really wish I had. I open Heather Taylor’s inbox and a little icon tells me there are over three hundred emails. They go back well over a year. My anger rises as I scroll down, backward through time, eyes scanning the first line of each one:

Happy Valentine’s Day, baby!

Thinking of you today

Wishing you were here xx

Waiting to give you your Christmas treat!

There is a photo attached to this one and I click on it. I hold my breath, half expecting to see a picture of Leah in some state of undress, but instead I’m confronted with an image of a perfectly formed Finnish bundt cake, the same one his “Mumu” used to make and which I’ve never been able to master, much to his obvious disappointment.

I scroll down further. The messages are banal, pedestrian even; emails about movies and music, random TikToks designed to make each other laugh. There’s one of a dog looking horrified by a squirrel on the TV.

What a bastard! I sent him that and he forwarded it to his fucking mistress!

They were obviously having an affair. Not a little dalliance in a hotel, ill-advised and regretted in the morning, but a full-on, maybe-we’re-in-love kind of affair. Back at the top, her most recent email shows pictures of the tickets for a concert she had intended to take him to. The concert is in two weeks. If I was still Leah by then, would I have to go? Take my cheating husband on a date and pose as his mistress? Would I have to make love to him, as her? I shudder at the thought and go to close the window. But then I spot it, a separate folder marked “Private.” I don’t want to click on it, but I can’t help myself.