Maybe I should have insisted on telling Margaret everything that happened at work. Maybe I shouldn’t have pretended it wasn’t affecting me. But if I know I’m stressed, I can protect against it myself, can’t I? And look, here I am doing fine with Charlie. I didn’t panic this evening when he fumbled his toothbrush and it went clattering into the bathroom sink. I just took a deep breath (take a deep breath, it says in my notes) and picked it back up for him and let him carry on. I didn’t make him open and close his hand ten times to prove to me that his fingers work fine.

Checking behaviours only make things worse.

Reading these pages has made me feel so much better. I am sure now that I can do this, I can manage. I’ve got a grip, I’ve remembered my logic.

When I get into bed, I feel completely fine.

On Monday morning, at the office, when Emma goes out to see one of her tenants, I click on Ms Jones’s computer file and bring up every record we have about her. I go through every one of my emails again. I can’t help myself. It doesn’t matter how hard I’ve tried not to think about it, my mind has been full of her all weekend. I have been involved from the very start and my actions are so tangled up in what happened, how can I leave it alone? She died in one of my flats, I was there when they found her, and it was me who missed her last check. I feel so responsible and the awfulness of what I saw still crushes my chest: those dead flowers, those flies, that radio playing. Every time I picture it, my eyes sting with tears because how, how did she end up so alone? There are just still so many blanks, so many questions and still I can’t shake the feeling that there is something else, some other connection between us, something knocking at the corner of my mind that I’ve missed. I’m desperate for an explanation, for information, for answers. I tell myself, maybe I didn’t look before at everything in her file. Maybe I overlooked something. Maybe there has been a mistake.

I take everything else off my desk – everything except my photo of Charlie – to make space. I undo the tabs on the paper file, the metal clasp catching under my finger, and pull out all the pieces of paper, every single one, and lay them out like a big jigsaw on the desk. There are plenty of sheets of paper – bureaucracy loves forms – but now the closer I look I see just how little information they contain.

A name.

A date and place of birth.

Previous addresses.

Previous landlords.

The temp agency she worked for.

The useless next of kin.