According to the booklet, I should now be slap bang in the middle of my anger phase. But I don’t feel angry, not at all. Could I be skipping this stage altogether? It’s hard to be angry with someone when the thing they have done isn’t something that was intended to hurt you, but a good thing they felt they owed to themselves. (Doesn’t he have a right to be happy?) Should I even be allowed to be angry under these particular circumstances? (I miss him.) The booklet doesn’t specify. Doesn’t he have a right to be somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else?

But it’s been ten years. Ten years. Jesus Christ. Three thousand five hundred and fifty-something days being a part of someone else’s equation. Ten years enabling Neil’s constant need for change. On a day-to-day basis, the list of the things I did for him was practically infinite. Over the last six months only:

The time he felt the seeds of a sustainable future lay in the consumption of kale crisps and I was the one who brought the cabbages home to desiccate in batches in the oven with olive oil spray and sea salt, like it said on the website he’d bookmarked. The bottom layer stuck to the tray like wallpaper, and the top was too crisp, verging on burnt. Neil laughed and didn’t even try one. I chucked the tray out without bothering to clean it. I began collecting vouchers for Planet Organic. I didn’t give up on him. I was good. I know I was good. I am good at being good to others. I accept that everyone has complex desires.

The time he read that Bikram Yoga offered the only really effective path to true clarity. He yearned for a steam room. We had a box bedroom, where I stored my clothes and magazines. So I got rid of them, buying white cushions and jasmine candles that he said would induce a meditative state. That Saturday, I spent the afternoon in my underwear in our sealed-up flat, the heating and the oven raging. I actually steamed some linen rags on a fucking pot on the stove and wrapped them around his head to provide him with the appropriate degree of heat and humidity.

Anger: I hunt for rage in my brain. I thought I had it, just a minute ago. But it’s hard to recover that spark, lying here, with my limbs weighing down the carpet. I remember it searing through my brain, a blind white shock like the pain of a bone fracture, on the night he left. And then it was gone. In the aftermath, I couldn’t sustain it.