I was angry because I was also proof of that other cliché: those who can’t, teach. How well I remember being on the lacrosse pitch that day. I remember running after a girl, her long dark ponytail swishing ahead of me, the fat on her thighs vibrating each time her foot slammed into the turf. She stopped, so I stopped, and there was a sound – a factual little pop. I dropped to the grass. That was it; that was the end.

Now I was a teacher, and Pete was a nurse, and one thing we had in common was a shared bitterness about our careers – specifically, the paltriness of our salaries. This was why we had been considering a move to the country. We regularly discussed the subject of money, and how ours would ‘go further’ in a country town. Each of these conversations was tinged with the desperate sniffing-out-of-scraps that phrase implies.

‘People have died in my arms, Amy,’ Pete would say sometimes, chopping a cucumber or meticulously towelling between his toes. ‘I mean, if that’s not worth something, what is?’

I’d known, or at least I remembered knowing, that Cilla was from the country. I had imagined it must be somewhere tiny, fragile, hidden. A grotto, a dell, the kind of place that could spawn someone like her. I hadn’t thought of her being from a place like this.

The town was almost a city: too big to be charming, too small to be cosmopolitan. Its historical buildings were surrounded by larger, more recent developments, and the whole was encircled by an industrial fringe: a carpet manufacturer miraculously still in business, a fan-belt factory that wasn’t. We drove past empty storefronts, lower-end chain stores, bars that promised both topless waitresses and $6.95 earlybird specials.

But this town needed teachers, and nurses, and the government was willing to pay a little extra to lure them from the city. We could make a nice life here, Pete had said. And wasn’t that what we wanted? To have a nice life?

At the first house, Pete jammed his hands in his pockets. He was wearing shorts, despite the weather, as though he needed to prove something to the cold.

Cilla held up the key. ‘Shall we?’ she said.

We followed her along the path to the front door and I took in her too-jaunty walk, as confident as it was lopsided, with one hip rotating up and forward. I pictured the ball rolling in that socket. It set my teeth on edge.

The first house was also the cheapest. It spread to the edges of a wide block, and was dated, beige, with a garden made from jagged stones and huge, hostile yucca plants. The whole house seemed to be hunching low to the ground. As Cilla slipped the key into the lock she turned, and must have caught my expression.