‘That was the chair,’ I say. I cackle. I notice it’s a sound I haven’t made for a while.

‘Sure,’ he says, laughing. ‘Two small beers please,’ he says politely to the barman who nods.

We cheers our glasses.

‘Thanks,’ he says.

‘What for?’ I ask.

‘You’ve put a smile on my haggard old-man face.’

‘You’re not that haggard,’ I say, with a grin.

We both laugh and hold each other’s stare a little longer than usual before resuming our strange, rambling conversation. Is this what people mean when they give you cheesy advice that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel? The dark cloud above my head is still there – but it’s feeling lighter now. For the first time, I can actually imagine it disappearing altogether. Today feels like a sort of fresh start.

31

Isla is in hospital looking frail. She is sitting up in her bed, the white covers draped over her. She is whispering to me, so I go closer.

‘What can I do?’ I ask desperately, kneeling at the side of her bed.

She starts talking but goes mute. I can’t hear her.

‘What are you saying, Isla?’

She is babbling, but no words come out.

She curls up into a foetal position in the bed, sad and vulnerable. A female doctor knocks gently and comes in holding a clipboard to her chest.

‘She’s a thief! You’re a thief!’ Isla shouts at the doctor in a hoarse voice. Her voice is coming back. I have a notepad on my lap and I start asking Isla questions.

‘Stop writing, Olive.’

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘Please stop doing that. This is my story. Not yours.’

‘I know.’

‘Everyone is stealing from me. Thieves!’ she shrieks.

The female doctor puts black Sellotape over Isla’s mouth.

I wake up suddenly, sweating. A bad dream again. I sit up in bed and glance around in the dark, waiting for the tightness in my chest to loosen. The dream has shaken me to the core. I reach over to my bedside table and pick up my phone. My last conversation with Isla on WhatsApp was a week ago. It shouldn’t feel surprising at the moment, given the trajectory and how we left things, but it still feels like a long time.

I don’t want to generalize ‘about women’, but I do think that we just know when something is up. That female intuition. We have pure gut instinct. We don’t need to ask for an explanation or scientific reasoning. We just know, we get a whiff, and then most of the time we are proved right. For example, if you ask most women, they will probably tell you that they knew way before any evidence surfaced that their partner was cheating on them. We are not paranoid, or silly, or hysterical: we have intuition. A deep-rooted emotional compass. So, I knew something was up with Isla.