I didn’t cry. I just felt numb. What else had I expected? Served me right for getting mixed up with a married man.

‘OK,’ I said, doing my best to sound blasé. ‘I guess it was fun while it lasted.’

‘It was.’ He didn’t even try to hide his relief. ‘So I don’t have to worry about my bunny rabbit?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Pet rabbit,’ he said, slowly and patiently, as if I was stupid. ‘Like in the film. Fatal Attraction. A married man has a one-night stand with someone and then he doesn’t want to see her again, and she gets obsessed with him and breaks into the family home and boils his kid’s pet rabbit in a pot.’

‘How horrible. I’d never do that. But anyway, you don’t have kids. Or a rabbit.’

‘It’s a joke. A figure of speech. Haven’t you ever heard people talking about bunny-boilers? That’s what they mean.’

He was still speaking unnecessarily slowly, and I was reminded of how clever he was, and how clever I wasn’t.

‘Well, I promise I will never do anything horrible to your rabbit. Or to anything else of yours.’

My voice sounded weird. Dry mouth. Nerves. Not because I was trying not to cry. It was only a one-night stand, for heaven’s sake, and didn’t everybody have those, at one time or another? It wasn’t like an actual proper relationship that had bitten the dust. You couldn’t even call it being dumped. It was nothing. Something that had stopped before it even got started.

‘That’s good to hear,’ he said.

I expected him to ring off after that, but when it came to it, he hesitated. Even though he wanted nothing more than to get rid of me, he seemed to feel the weight of it: the saying of a final goodbye to someone who was once your lover, if only briefly.

‘Take care of yourself, OK, Jenny? Good luck with everything. You’re a great girl, and you deserve to be with someone who will love you properly.’

‘So do you,’ I said.

Was I imagining it, or had there been a slight catch in his voice when we exchanged our last goodbyes, just before he ended the call?

I replayed that conversation so many times in the days that followed. I knew it was silly of me to dwell on it. Bunny-boilerish, even. But I really didn’t have any thoughts of vengeance. I was just sad about it. It felt so much as if there could have been something more… but there wasn’t, and there never would be, and there was nothing for it but to accept that. Because the alternative was to turn into some kind of crazy, obsessed person, a stalker or worse, and what did that have to do with love?

It was just that I could suddenly understand how you might become that person. And I never would have done, before.

Then, a couple of weeks after the awful phone conversation, I finally told someone about it.