She’d deleted their shared song list on Twitter months ago, but she knew it by heart because they were all assembled on her iPod, under a playlist she’d named Mix Tape. To put on her headphones and play them through without a break was one of her greatest pleasures, from the first throb of ‘Pump It Up’ to the final fade of ‘Go Down Easy’. She’d deleted the final three, the three he hadn’t replied to, because she knew she’d lost him by then, but still, she loved this list, loved what it said about her and Dan and the road they’d travelled on to get here. This evening though, it only made her desperately sad, which was something that happened too: sometimes she felt none of the remembered joy, only the distance and the ache of loss. She got as far as ‘Let’s Dance’, then M. Ward got to her with his intimate melancholy and she pulled off the headphones and lay down on the floor of her office with tears streaming sideways from her eyes, down her temples, on to the wooden floor. She was a pulpy mess of self-pity and she hated herself for being her own worst enemy, for wanting what she couldn’t have, for not having had the strength or the imagination, when the chance presented itself, to give up one life for another. Cass had been angry with her at first: sympathetic, and angry, at one and the same time. She’d told her that she’d made her bed, so she should lie in it; then she’d said, ‘Oh, darling girl,’ and held her close when Ali burst into tears of despair. That was months ago, way back in February, when she’d not long been back from Quorn, and oh, there’d been so many tears since then, and now, once more, she covered her face with her hands and gave herself up to misery. Time was not healing this pain. She couldn’t think straight any more. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t make Michael happy – although he refuted this, he trusted in the past, thought happiness lay in how things once were, and could be again, and at first this had been a comfort, but at times such as this, Ali saw that his belief in the perfect order of their previous lives could just be a kind of blindness holding them back. Couldn’t they both be freed from constraint? Couldn’t they each benefit from the shaking off of all the accumulated layers of habit and expectation? But how to go about freeing a person who didn’t consider himself in chains? And anyway, all Michael would say was that what Ali called freedom, he called adultery. He was brutally moral, constitutionally upright. And there was this too: he said he loved her, and he didn’t desire any other woman.