The thing that kept her hanging in there as long as she did was that they loved each other. It was a difficult thing to explain and so she didn’t try. But from the first time he’d caught her eye across the pool table she’d felt it—oh! This!—and that night they’d kissed in the car park, him pushing her against the brick wall and her wanting him to, and her favourite red top which she hand-washed in the sink with shampoo because it was that delicate all snagged in the back from rubbing against those rough bricks and she didn’t even care because it was the night she met her person, the one who made her feel the way she didn’t know a big-hipped, plain-faced daughter of a killer could feel. Like a girl in a movie. Like the girl, the one that you know will be happy ever after because how could anyone not cherish the living hell out of her?

It’s hard to let go of someone who makes you feel that way. Her friend Asha said there’s plenty more fish in the sea and you’re hot you’ll find someone else in a minute and you can do so much better and she knew it was true but also that, in a way, it wasn’t. Because they loved each other and what was better than that? What could be?

But she was nothing if not sensible and self-sufficient and other shit that girls like her had to be even (especially) when someone was making them feel like they were a different kind of girl, the kind who would always be taken care of. She ended it. He begged. Cried. Shouted. Carved her name into his arm with a penknife. This last made it easier to go.

There had been other men she liked and who liked her. A couple who she might have married if they’d asked, but they didn’t, and she wasn’t mad enough about them to push the issue. It was more like, well, if he wants to I can’t see the harm. That was all in her twenties, though. By her thirties she was asked out less often and accepted few of those who did ask. She’d had enough sex to know that at least half the time it wasn’t worth the effort, and when it was it could make you loopy, make you feel like your life wasn’t whole anymore without the sex and the man. How many women, in her own bloody family alone, had let that loopiness become their driving force? How many good women ruined by being unable to let go of a really good fuck?