Then of course she had met Dave – sprinting to his rescue in the street, only for him eventually to rescue her right back, by being so trustworthy and good and kind, restoring her faith in the possibility of love, when she’d believed it to be gone forever. He’d asked her her name in the A&E department as he lay there, woolly-headed and drowsy, and misheard her reply. ‘Bernie?’ he’d said. ‘What’s that short for – Bernadette?’

She’d twinkled at him, arched an eyebrow. ‘Bernie is usually short for Bernadette, yes,’ she’d agreed, without correcting the misunderstanding. ‘But my friends call me Bunny.’

‘Bunny,’ he’d repeated woozily, smiling up at her. He had a lovely smile. ‘Hello there, Bunny. Do you come here often?’

Later, he’d introduced her to members of his family as ‘Bernadette’, but she always cried, ‘Oh please, call me Bunny! Bernadette sounds too severe. I’m really not a severe sort of person.’ And somehow she’d never quite managed to say, By the way, Dave, my name isn’t actually Bernadette at all. It’s Rachel Roberts, but you probably shouldn’t Google me, if you know what I mean. It was easier to go along with the story, to spin a little fairy-tale of goodness around herself. Rachel Roberts was a torrid tragedy that had been someone else altogether.

Things like bank cards and post were slightly trickier to explain, sure, but Bunny arranged for any important mail to be forwarded to a PO box in town, swooping by and picking it up now and then. It wasn’t as if she was lying, exactly, to Dave. More that she was edging around the truth, keeping certain things from him. Self-preservation, she saw it as, and who could blame her? Because she’d been kicked to rags down on the floor already, and it had been enough for one lifetime. Never again would she let a person hurt her like that; never again would she be the powerless, scared sheep on someone else’s tether.

This had all been fine at first; a means of sealing that tender, bruised part of herself away from the rest of the world. But as she began to fall in love with Dave, and trust him, as she moved into his house and they took holidays together, and his mum dropped hints about Dave popping the question and making things ‘official’, Bunny had been feeling less confident concerning what she had omitted telling him about her life, about her. ‘I’m not in any hurry to get married,’ she said pre-emptively before Valentine’s Day, terrified he was going to propose. That was the moment when she should have told him she’d been married once before, but something stopped her. Why jinx her relationship by letting the past sneak in and taint it? Why jeopardize the second chance she’d so painstakingly created for herself?