She clicks off and I hear a car door slam. The engine takes two attempts to start. I take another swig of the cheap wine and feel her words drill into me, shattering any hope that was developing. I look into the lounge and see the ghosts of my family life – you sitting at the kitchen table playing snakes and ladders with Charlie and Laura. Me cooking and laughing and telling everyone that dinner will be ready in a minute.

The kids running upstairs to wash their hands, and your hands on my waist, your lips on my neck. I’m slipping back into my deep grief, down into a chasm where it was just you and me between the sheets, back to moonlit nights in foreign countries before the kids, where we talked and kissed and promised our lives to each other.

I gulp down the bottle of wine and stagger upstairs. I change into a tight black dress and heels, underpinned by tarty underwear. I don’t bother with tights, but I smother myself in cheap perfume and draw on make-up until I hardly recognise my own, admittedly blurry, face in the mirror.

I’m not too pissed to know that staying in will lead to me falling over the precipice of my own grief, but I am too pissed to consider anything except another night in a Premier Inn with a random stranger. Peter Daubney’s stolen credit card doesn’t seem so threatening now – surely if they thought it was me I would have been arrested?

Full of bravado I call a cab and, when it arrives, I stumble in. The driver looks at me in his rear-view mirror.

‘Where to, love?’

I think. Maybe the Chadderton Premier Inn. Why not make it a hat-trick? I begin to laugh and the driver starts his engine.

‘Chaddy Premier Inn, Please.’ He nods and smiles and I feel I have to qualify myself. ‘Meeting my sister.’

‘Whatever you say, love.’

He flicks on the meter and drives off the estate. I suddenly see the glass house in the park.

‘Stop. Here. Stop here. This will do, thanks.’

He pulls up at the kerb.

‘Are you sure, love? Look, I can take you home. It’s remote and—’

‘I’m fine. Here’s fine.’

I am fine. I suddenly feel sober. I need to stay away from the Premier Inn. But I need to be out of my house. The in-between will have to wait.