Sometimes it frustrated me – the first man I’d ever felt this way about, and he was technically still married, embroiled in an acrimonious break-up. But what was perfect at our age? All I knew was I finally felt something I never had before. True desire, true, dizzying passion. My stomach turned over when he smiled at me, when he rolled up the sleeves of a shirt to show his tanned forearms. I hoarded little moments from my day to tell him, funny things the dogs had done or Marilyn’s sayings, and I wanted to hear everything about his day too. What he’d had to eat, what he’d watched on TV, which trees he had chopped down at work and which were safe. What part of the Lakes he’d driven to on jobs, picnicking by the side of a tarn or on a stony beach, perhaps. After years of worrying if something was wrong with me, because I always lost interest so fast in relationships, rolling my eyes as a man told me the dull details of his life, I had finally found it. Alex. I’d even let myself make plans – maybe we’d get a place together, with a room for his son, Sam, to stay in. Sam would love Brandy. Anna would settle down eventually, meet someone else. We’d be happy.

Looking back on that moment, I wish I could shake some sense into the woman in the red coat with the dog on the lead, breathing in the fresh after-rain smell of the woods. Tell her that she of all people should have known never to let down her guard. She should have realised you can’t make plans. Because you never know when the safe little world you’ve so carefully put together will fall apart like a house of cards. And then I saw it in the leaves, the clothes, the white hand, and that was that. My life as I knew it was over.

I know it sounds strange, what I did. That instead of calling the police I came home, fed Brandy, tidied the kitchen, made porridge for my breakfast, ate it on the bench in my small back garden, soaking up the last of the October sun. Several hours passed. I hoovered, mopped the floor, though it wasn’t my usual day for cleaning. I kept my body moving and my mind totally blank, as I had learned to in the past. People do strange things at times like this. Your routine keeps you running like a train on tracks, even when the engine’s busted. All the same, I was sure it would come, the knock at the door. I didn’t turn on the radio as I normally would, knowing at some point I’d hear the words body found in woodland.