At the sound of his name, he turns and we both look at each other in astonishment.

‘Livvie?’

‘What are you doing here?’ I pause at my gate.

He’s rolled his sleeves down to cover his tattoos. ‘I’ve got a meeting with the new owner about some building work—’ He breaks off and frowns, noticing the keys in my hand. ‘Hang on. What are you doing here?’

My eyes dart to his van and for the first time I notice the logo painted down the side.

‘You’re Nettlewick Building Contractors?’

At which point my plastic bags finally decide they can’t hold it together any longer and choose that moment to split, scattering loo rolls, tins of baked beans and a crushing sense of inevitability all over the wet cobbles. It’s the perfect end to the day.

Anger and Letting It Go

When I discovered my husband’s affair, everyone told me I needed to get angry. Naomi, friends, self-help books, even the therapist I saw for a while after David left. Apparently anger is a healthy emotion, whereas crying in the toilets at work is not. It’s one of the stages you need to go through.

My therapist seemed almost disappointed by my lack of fury. And I tried, really I did. I managed flashes of anger, usually fuelled by wine and late nights, but try as I might, I couldn’t keep hold of it. It would slip through my drunken fingers and I’d go back to feeling sad and scared.

But since Harry came to live with me, things have started to change. For the first few weeks after he arrived home from the shelter, he was completely shut down. He couldn’t even wag his tail or look at me, and whenever I made a sudden movement he would shy away in fear. And for the first time I stopped feeling sad and scared and started feeling angry – angry towards the people who had treated him so badly and tossed him away like a piece of rubbish. Furious. Indignant. Outraged.

And it started to rub off on me.

By getting angry about what had happened to Harry, I started feeling angry about what had happened to me. Only I got angry at the wrong people. I got angry at poor Ajay. And I got angry at myself. So last night I wrote an email: To David, the Man Who Broke My Heart. A furious, ranting, punching bag of an email, into which I poured out every single drop of rage and betrayal. Long, rambling sentences without care for the punctuation. Me, an English teacher. Until I was left purged and exhausted at my keyboard and it was long past midnight.

Then I pressed ‘Delete’.

And it was all gone and, with it, most of the anger too. Because I’ve realized that while anger might be healthy and liberating for a while, I only have to watch a certain scruffy black dog happily sniffing around the overgrown bramble bushes that are my garden to see that healthier still is letting it go. Who knows what Harry went through before he was dumped on those moors, but he’s not angry or bitter about what happened in the past. It’s in the past.