I would also delete every message that might have incriminated me, and scour my phone for new contacts or apps each morning. There was always something that needed deleting. A harsh message about you to April. A mortifying website I’d visited. A really grim meme I’d shared. I began to feel like Drunk Louise was working as hard as she could to fuck my life up.

I have a video somewhere of the two of us, me and April, on one of our nights out. Except of course it’s not me. It’s Her. Anyway, I found it on my phone the next day and it’s just April and Drunk Louise with the phone held overhead in what I think is Drunk Louise’s hand, shouting, ‘We hate you, Sober Louise!’ And watching it made me feel ill, like I was seeing my friend and my worst enemy united. Stabbing me in the back.

And then there was the time I found the Tinder app on my phone one morning, which felt like a trap laid especially for me by Her. There’s a chance she downloaded it for innocent reasons. It might have been so April could show me some guy she was sleeping with. It might even have been a bizarre moment of curiosity, just a way of understanding what so many people talked about. But it might also have been for a much worse reason. I deleted it, googled whether it might show up in my phone’s history, and then deleted my searches, too.

But you grew wise to me in the end. When you walked in late in the afternoon after a trip, and found me looking drawn and fragile, I could see that you knew. It was during this time that you started to make cutting remarks about April, or to grow angry whenever she was brought up. I knew you’d never really liked her, but the animosity stepped up and up, until I stopped mentioning her at all. But your silent, icy disapproval spread to encompass everything I did after that. It became, in fact, the one constant in our marriage.

The neurotic side to my personality got completely out of control during this time, too. I became unable to stop cleaning. Tidying. Perfecting. And I could see that you hated this just as much. You saw it as another character flaw, one that you’d failed to fix.

And so we come, inevitably, to last Friday. To the night when every one of my worst nightmares came true.