I lay on my back in the dark, eyes wide open, and knew straight away that Matty was not beside me. Was that what had woken me, that knowledge? The duvet on his side was flung back. The display on the electronic clock read 4.22 a.m. Above me there were three stripes of light that fanned across the ceiling from the streetlight outside, a kind of nighttime rainbow but in monochrome. I recalled how I had lain awake and stared at it the first night I had spent in my own flat. I had been a child growing up with her parents, then in university rental, shared housing, then back with my parents for a bit, then another flat share – and eventually I had saved enough to buy myself this small place in a modern block near the centre of town and not far from school. The kitchen was just a kitchenette in the living room. The carpet the developer had put in had a slightly shiny, synthetic feel and the common areas of the block were shabby, but for months I could not get over the novelty of putting my own key in my own door. And the very first night I spent here, surrounded by boxes and bin liners of clothing – that very first night, the only thing set up was the bed, and I lay awake staring at the ceiling and looking at the rainbow in different shades of white and grey. On my rare moments of loneliness in the years I had lived in that flat, it had kept me company, reminded me that I was not alone: that outside, there was a world. I would stare at it as if it was a secret nobody knew but me.

I lay on my back for a while, watching the rainbow of grey and white light and listening, interrogating the silence. A car drove past in the street below, the small hum of it flaring and fading, leaving an echo of itself. The only other sound was my own breathing. I had the illusion, as I sometimes do, that I was the only person awake in the whole world, and that that was a fine and secret thing.

Where was Matthew?

The thought came to me that perhaps Matty did not exist, and everything that had happened over the last few months was some kind of dream that I had just woken from, that I was in fact single, living alone, just as I had been before I met him at the City Care Centre when I had injured my ankle, and that the intensity of my feelings, my love, my uncertainty, the sex, all the drama and shouting and weeping too, the broken thing I had become, that all of it had vanished and I was lying there breathing and thinking, what an odd dream, what was that about?