I clicked on her profile. Why did she meet Anna if not for a massage? I soon found out – this Alison Harper was a divorce lawyer, based in Barrow in Furness. That made sense, didn’t it? Anna and Alex were splitting up, so of course she would want to consult a lawyer. But Alex had told me she was in denial about it, that she didn’t want a divorce, and that was borne out by my own experience of her confronting me in the street. I tried to remember exactly what she’d said to me that day, as much as I had taken in through my fog of shock that it was happening at all. I don’t want you near him. Stay away from my family. That seemed unequivocal – she wanted Alex back.

It was getting late now, the night drawing in already, the days an hour shorter than even two weeks before. I had nowhere else to go, so I’d have to return to the dreary flat, face whatever was waiting there for me. It had been a long and stressful day, and I was half-dead on my feet from hunger and shock. Rousing myself from my funk as I reached my side of town, I clicked on the website link from Alison Harper’s Facebook page, and found the phone number. I’d do this the old-fashioned way and make an appointment. A little dishonest, perhaps, since I wasn’t married and therefore didn’t need a divorce, but what else could I do?

Alison Harper’s firm was based in the centre of Barrow, on a busy main street with shops and offices, cafés, all of life bustling around me. As I walked down it the next morning, I realised I had started to log things away, feelings and impressions, in case I went to prison again. The smell of brewing coffee. The freedom to walk into a shop and browse a rack of blouses, riffle my hand through the silky fabric. The breeze on my face, even. British prisons were nicer, weren’t they? You got TVs and they didn’t let the inmates kill each other. And a life sentence here, what was that – ten years maybe, if you kept your head down? I’d be less than fifty. Still time left.

No. It was no good bargaining with myself, calculating the years in my head. I would not survive if I went to prison again for another crime I didn’t commit. I had to figure this out. I buzzed and went up the stairs to Alison Harper’s office, to a neat reception area with a Nespresso machine. Alison, when she came out to greet me, was about my age, in an M&S trouser suit and with shiny highlighted hair. I noted her maroon gel nails and felt I could trust someone like this, who paid attention to the little things.