What would I tell Shelley, anyway? I would tell her it’s okay to be confused. It’s a confusing business, when the man who seemed so keen on you turns out to be the same man who ends up making you feel bad about every aspect of yourself. Hold your head up, Shelley, I would tell her. Don’t doubt yourself. If it’s wrong for a man to grab your arms or throw things around then no matter how upset he is, it’s still wrong. When your gut feeling tells you he’s lying about where he’s been, don’t let his anger deflect you. Above all, the minute he starts telling you how paranoid or insecure you are, how you think too much and have an overactive imagination – then be certain you are absolutely right. When that moment comes, Shelley: don’t walk, run.

It is the day after, and I am in the British Transport Police building opposite the station, in Inspector Barker’s upstairs office. He is at his computer, using two stubby forefingers to bash at the keyboard so hard it sounds like woodpeckers having a row. Every now and then he stops, lifts the fingers and sighs melodramatically. I am staring at the map on the wall behind him. All around the station, there is a boundary line, drawn with a green Sharpie. It covers Station Road, but not the Great Northern Hotel. It sweeps past the bike racks but doesn’t go as far as Waitrose. Round the back of the station, it swerves in a dogleg to include the freight depot. Something about this line is making me feel odd, inside, in the same way you feel a little odd just before the beginning of nausea, an uncomfortable feeling, unidentifiable as yet.

And then it comes to me. I stare at it in disbelief, although it is myself I disbelieve rather than the line. To double-check, I trace the line again, beginning at the main entrance to the station and following it round, picturing the different points that I am so familiar with after nearly two years, and eventually, I come back to the beginning again and am outside the main entrance, halfway between it and the steps of the hotel. There is no doubt about it. The line delineates what used to be the boundaries of my existence. It replicates to the metre the area where my bodiless form was allowed to drift, the invisible force field that circumnavigated my world.