They leave and Katy sits in stunned silence. I throw all the excess packaging and piles of dirty plates into the skip. We tidy up the best we can. Katy’s looking around with a this could have been me in a year look. I pack up my laptop and push the remaining clothes in the tumble dryer into a holdall. When we’ve finished I find Katy in the lounge, staring at the family picture still on the wall.

‘You know, it all looks so normal on the outside, doesn’t it? But we’ve both got ourselves into a right situation. What the hell is the story with the stalker?’

I sit down heavily on a huge pile of newspapers.

‘I was getting pissed all the time. I probably can’t remember most of it. I certainly don’t know who Allan Parrot is. And this lot. Again. Pissed. Late-night ordering on Amazon Prime.’

She shakes her head.

‘We could never have known, could we? When I went out with Jack, I just thought people were basically good. It never occurred to me that he would lie. But you were here with your children waiting for him. And that Louise. She was at the other end.’

‘He had her arrested, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know. He told me. It was a warning without actually saying it. Warning me that if I tried anything that’s how I would end up. There must be something wrong with him. Compulsive liar or something.’

That’s what I used to believe. Compulsive liar. I scoured psychological case studies to find a condition where someone lied constantly about where they had been and what they had done. Where they believed their own hype. It’s a symptom of lots of psychological pathology. I guess he got so caught up in the endless lies that he could never have put it right.

Now I believe that he didn’t want to. Katy is an earlier version of me and, just like Louise Shaw said, people must be wondering why she doesn’t let it go. To someone on the outside it looks like we are holding on in the hope of reconciliation, but in reality Jack is forcing us not to let go, because we have invested so much in keeping him that we might let go of ourselves.

I did let go of myself. I became out of control and put myself in danger. I slept with people I didn’t know. I could have caught an STD or been killed. It just seemed like pissed-up fun mixed with danger. Now I realise that I was fraternising with people who are transient and searching for danger themselves. Misfits. Hanging about in bars night after night, sleeping with each other on a fucked-up circuit of middle-aged hell.