But this wasn’t his ‘end game’, as he put it. In Tate’s social media biographies, he described himself as an Entrepreneur. Tate, one read. 30. Entrepreneur. Fearless Adventurer. Manly Arts. To the Victor Go the Spoils. His feeds were filled with staged photographs: Tate at a music festival wearing a feathered headdress, his abdomen striped with paint. Tate at a polo match, his white jeans rolled up above his boat shoes. Tate in ferocious sunshine at a motorsport event, wearing a bandana and brandishing a champagne gun – a thing that resembled an assault rifle, loaded with a bottle of Moët or Veuve Clicquot.

We met because I was a teller at the bank where he held his accounts and where he had tried to secure a loan to launch his entrepreneurial venture. I’d seen the application. He called himself The Charisma Coach. Charisma, he’d written, is a skill. It can be learned. Anyone can be charming. Anyone can be popular. Anyone can move through the world with grace and ease.

The loan was rejected, and so Tate started the venture by maxing out his credit cards. His efforts at building his business had continued throughout our relationship. Even in the new house, he set up a home studio with lights and a camera in a little storage room off the kitchen. He spent his days at work and his evenings against a plain white sheet he’d pinned to the wall, talking into the camera about expansive body language, phrases to instantly make people trust you, how to spot a liar, how to spot a narcissist.

He filmed himself from the waist up. He said this was because studies had proven that videos shot from this angle received the greatest amount of engagement. But I suspected that it was actually because of his legs. Tate never admitted this, but he hated his legs. He was built like a griffin, with a long neck and broad chest above the slight pudge of his abdomen, his top half promising a length his legs did not deliver. He was the only man I’d ever seen with cankles.

He was a clever dresser, though. In winter, with coats and trousers, you could almost fail to notice this quirk of his proportions. This is why I lived for the summertime. I’d buy him shorts in a variety of garish colours and patterns – pineapples, flamingoes, popsicles. When he wore them I loved to walk behind him; I was hypnotised by his mismatched halves. I found it oddly moving to witness the involuntary sway of his hips as his body tried, over and over, to put itself right.