I foresee their whole relationship. The young woman is called Shelley. She owns a small house in Longthorpe – her parents helped her and her ex out when she got pregnant, out of her dad’s redundancy pay and some money from her nan. She works as a personal assistant to the Human Resources Manager at the Cambridgeshire Energy Company, it’s a big employer round here. She’s good at her job but hates leaving little Estella in daycare all day while she’s at work. She would much rather she went to morning nursery now she’s three but she can’t ask her mum to pick her up five days a week and have her all afternoon, she’s not in good health, and what would she do during school holidays?

Matthew is everything her ex wasn’t: kind and attentive, wanting to know all about her, so interested all the time, caring where she is at night and about what she’s wearing. He loves her in short dresses – she’s tiny, sometimes a size eight is a bit baggy on her – and when he tells her to throw out her jeans and leggings because dresses suit her much better, she does. Only six weeks into the new year, Matthew moves in with her and her daughter in the little semi-detached house in Longthorpe.

It begins not long after that, although of course it has begun already, when Matthew places bread she doesn’t want to eat on her plate and she eats it anyway because it’s rather cute he orders her to do it and he’s just being kind, right?

*

The first time Matty tells Shelley about me – well, it’s during a row. It’s a month after Matty has moved into her place. There is a reunion of friends from her old workplace and she still isn’t over the novelty of there being someone else around and not having to ask her mum or book a babysitter every time. She doesn’t take him for granted or anything, she says to him, well in advance, ‘Is there any chance you could be in for Estella on Thursday so I can go to this thing?’

And at the time, the time she asks him, on the Monday, he takes her face in his hands and kisses the top of her head and says, ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll make sure I leave work on time. It’ll be good for me to do bedtime for her, we can bond a bit.’ She’s pleased to hear him say this as she worries that Estella gets on his nerves a bit sometimes – which is fair enough as that’s what three-year-olds do and he hasn’t lived with a child in the house before so, you know, she’s cutting him a bit of slack on that one and explaining to Estella why it’s important to be well-behaved around him.