The fear began to kick in long before you noticed anything. At least, long before you started to question me about what Drunk Louise had got up to. Before your reaction to me changed.

We’d had eight increasingly happy months. Dina had receded into the background a little. Your work was going well, and so was mine. I’d finally succeeded in joining the Mother Pluckers after two of the members put me forwards to audition, and although a couple of others were patronising as hell towards me about not being a parent, it was generally a kind and talented bunch that I liked spending time with.

Then came the anniversary of the day you’d married Dina. Which was also the night we found out that Dina was now engaged to her new man.

I’d watched you descend into a foul mood the day before, already steeped in resurging resentment at how quickly Dina had left you. I’d started to understand, by then, that what other people thought of you was more important than you claimed. It was the real reason for the expensive clothes and the flashy car. In the way you liked to mention the specifics of the eye-wateringly pricy wine you bought.

It had taken me a while to really put my finger on it, though. I suppose the constant effort to hide my own insecurities made me blind to yours. Perhaps I’d seen you acting up a little around your posher friends. Suddenly booking tickets to the opera just before we met up with Patrick, and then talking at length about it. Insisting we had to have monkfish parcels and tuna carpaccio when he came for dinner.

But it didn’t really hit home until the time you brought the wrong credit card to dinner and then couldn’t pay at the end of the meal. I’d never seen you humiliated before, and I’d never have guessed that you could sink into seething self-laceration as bad as mine. My breezy statement that I was delighted to pay my way for once did nothing to lift you out of it.

I began to reinterpret what had happened with Dina, and to see it as a massive blow to your sense of self-worth. I tried to reassure myself that you felt nothing for her now. But it didn’t really convince me that I was safe, and I woke up on the morning of your anniversary with the heaviest of depressions hanging over me.

Your morose silence that day did nothing to lift it. You didn’t tell me about the engagement. You barely put a whole sentence together all day.

April clocked that something was up when we spoke on the phone that afternoon, and despite feeling profoundly humiliated by it all, I told her what was going on.