You left. Your visit had kick-started my insight into what was happening and although I was still rock-bottom, I was standing up and not lying down. The most painful realisation hit me at that moment and I stood in the hallway and watched you drive away. I was going to have to endure this every day of my life. Every morning I was going to have to wake up and remember what had happened.

There was no way to stop it. I couldn’t kill myself. It would just make things worse for Charlie and Laura, and prove you right. So I had to get on with it, somehow. I emailed work without checking my emails and told them that I was sick. Even that seemed like a betrayal of my children, as if I knew that at some point I would be better. Better. I never was better. Just different.

So you can see why I have to do this now, can’t you, Jack? Fight fire with fire. In the garden I take out Christine’s perfume and spray a little bit on my wrist. Still good after all those years. It’s a deep hole and there’s a lot of stuff in there. It’s like an unlucky dip of everything that’s gone wrong in my life. I push my hand deep into the wallets and watches and credit cards and photographs and pull out an item at random. Mrs Simister’s business card. It had to be, didn’t it?

It’s like a warning. As if to say, Be careful, Caroline, because you know what happened with this. God, I did feel sorry about that. I was just trying to find out what you were doing, because you wouldn’t tell me. I was following you. Yes. But only because you were lying. I saw you with Lorna. I was watching you, but she said I was stalking her. They saw me on the cameras in the car park.

Now I know I’m right because she’s on your list. You leaned in and I couldn’t quite tell if it was a kiss or not. Obviously I went straight from zero to ten in one second. I knew that, if I asked you, you would say you weren’t having an affair with Lorna, no matter how it looked. I know now you gave her three out of ten but that’s not how it looked that day.

She looked hot and you were all over her. The mist descended and I stopped crouching behind the bush and started to walk across the car park, towards her Audi. It was anger that drove me. I admit it. I imagined her and you exposed, trying to explain something that couldn’t be explained, cancelling out the pain I was feeling right at that moment.