Her companion had red sneakers, splayed legs, and a sweater with a giant yellow M&M on it. She watched sullenly as Sabine licked the grease from her fingers. Thick flakes of pastry caught in the faux fur of her coat’s collar. As she turned her head, slowly, like an injured animal, I withdrew into the doorway of a sports shop. I allowed myself to be pushed past several rails of luminous polyester T-shirts before elbowing my way out.

By then, Sabine had left. Gone.

Just as in nightmares in which I start by whispering “help,” then escalate to a shout, I called, quietly at first, “Sabine,” then louder, “SABINE, SABINE!”

Amid the honking of buses and cars, I ran across the intersection. Shoving through a crowd mesmerized by a beatbusker, I climbed the steps of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. From the top, I scanned the streets for a black coat alongside a giant yellow M&M sweater. Both had disappeared.

Later, I felt guilty about what Sabine appeared to have become. Had my violence towards her been the start of it? Yet along with guilt, I nursed a shameful sense of schadenfreude. I went home grateful, so, so grateful, that my new partner was a neat, normal man rather than a giant yellow M&M sweater person. Though we’d been on the verge of splitting up, I stayed with him for another five years. Or to be more accurate, I stayed until I came across the next temporary ending to Sabine’s story.

Although I’d googled her on and off plenty of times and found nothing, one night I located her name in an interview on a personal travel blog. She was a diving instructor in the Cayman Islands. Her girlfriend owned a bar on the beach. In a photograph, the two of them clasped hands. Sabine’s eyes were covered by bug-eye dark glasses but she looked no different from when she was twenty-three. Her tooth was fixed and they were grinning into the camera like mischievous kids. The sun was going down behind them over a clear stretch of aquamarine.

My tired eyes hurt; my heart limped with great thuds. So, I’d got it wrong about Piccadilly Circus. So, she hadn’t been sexually complex; she’d just not fancied me enough. So, she’d left anything fucked up with men far behind. She’d found herself a fairy-tale ending after all.

I don’t believe it was mere coincidence that shortly afterwards my neat, normal partner and I split up. The idea that Sabine had grabbed at something out of the ordinary made me long to have the courage to do the same.