I held you a bit tighter and your hands rose to the bottom of my spine. I looked up. You were staring out of the window.

‘I don’t know, Ruth,’ you said into the darkness of our garden. ‘Don’t you ever want to share it with more than one person?’

It’s tough to patch together what happened after that.

My forehead becomes damp with the effort of remembering, and I wish I had a wet towel, the folded kind a loving parent might bring to a sick child.

Incoherent memories are a common reaction to trauma. Scraps of last night’s conversation fly violently against the walls of my skull. A subdural haematoma is usually associated with traumatic brain injury. This is what it feels like. My head hurts badly. There are violet dots behind my eyes, lines of dialogue but no punctuation.

I think most of it took place in the kitchen. I broke the hug, pushed you away. I shouldn’t have because you really went for it after that. I stood next to the sink and watched that familiar confidence fill your features. I’m sure I must have been nodding, because you didn’t wait for me to catch up. And that’s how it had worked for us, remember? You, in the driver’s seat. Me, sitting next to you, tracing our trajectory with my finger on the map. Following your route. Except you weren’t even letting me do that. You didn’t seem to care if I came along.

Finally, you lined up the evidence. You went on and on and on and on. My patronizing attitude, your restlessness, my silence, the ways we tended towards and shrank away from each other, never quite meeting in the middle.

‘That’s just us,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what we’re like?’

‘Right, that’s what we’re like,’ you said. ‘It doesn’t mean that it’s right,’ you said. ‘Like two parallel lines,’ you said.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course I’m fucking serious.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re getting wound up,’ I said, because right then I really didn’t.

‘Jesus Christ, Ruth. You know exactly what I’m getting at,’ you said. ‘I want to break up.’

I thought you were joking. I thought you were annoyed about something I’d done, wanted to get laid, probably wanted to get laid more in general, had got something into your head. You were always getting something into your head. I remember my cheeks heating up, becoming intolerably hot. Did I raise my voice?