It was the end of March. Matty and I had met seven months ago and been living together for five. I was thirty-six years old. I was an English Language and Literature teacher in a large girls’ comprehensive twenty minutes’ walk from where I lived. I was popular with my pupils, good at my job. I was eyeing up the post of Head of Department, which was due to become available in a year when the current Head, Adrian, retired. I was in good health other than the fact that I suffered from Non-Epileptic Seizures, or NES, a condition diagnosed as epilepsy when I was a child, controlled by drugs, and now officially unexplained. It was why I didn’t want a driving licence, why I considered myself physically maladroit. But other than that, and the occasional bout of insomnia and mild depression, if you had asked me, before Matty, I would have said I had a good life – not exciting, but comfortable. I had a great group of friends, my own flat. I was the only child of retired parents who were longing for me to settle down with a nice young man but apart from a vague sense of anxiety about the future, my single status hadn’t bothered me all that much. It bothered me less than it seemed to bother other people. I wanted to know the shape of my future, granted, and I thought maybe I wanted children, but secretly I was also envisaging a life in which I was really, really good at my job, a life in which I made my contribution that way and would become irritated, as I aged, with the way that other people viewed me as brave but a little sad. I was thinking of learning French, and going on one of those vineyard holidays where you learned about wine and dressed in crisp white shirts and beautiful silver earrings and looked cultured and elegant, although I also loved pasta and had never been to Italy.

In other words, before Matty came on the scene, I had a life.

*

It was a Wednesday night. I woke suddenly, eyes snapping open, going from deep sleep to clarity in an instant. It never happened that way in the mornings, however loud or shrill the alarm. Coming to consciousness in the mornings was always a process.