Bunny had taken to looking at maps recently. Wales. Cornwall. The Highlands. She scrolled through them on her phone screen, zooming in to city centres and around towns, thinking: This one? Here? Maybe that one? while waiting for some impulse within her to ring like a struck bell. Hoping for a signal – a premonition, a good feeling, anything – that would guide her next move. She’d even considered London, with its warren of roads and districts and communities. Everyone could have a fresh start in London, right?

It wasn’t working out for her in York any more, that was for sure. Ever since the horrible, shouting man in Gloucestershire, she’d felt as if she was on borrowed time. She was hiding behind her lies, hiding behind Dave, using whatever she could find as a shield to protect herself. It made her think of history lessons at school: imagining wooden fortresses in old battles, the boom of gunpowder, the clamour of dying men. And there she was, crouching behind her increasingly flimsy shield, the hot, thick stink of sulphur and mud and metal in the air; too scared to let anyone see her real self.

With every day that passed, she felt as if the new life she’d built for herself here as Bunny was under threat of collapse. She’d begun eating sweets in secret, stashing bags of them in her knicker drawer or handbag. She’d bailed out of her last two gym sessions with excuses about coming down with a cold and feeling lethargic. And it was becoming harder to resist temptation, to walk past chip shops without diving in for a hot salty bagful, to stop herself hacking off great lumps of cheese to post into her mouth while cooking, to recognize when she was full and put her cutlery down.

Go away, Rachel. Go away, spineless weak Rachel. You can’t come back.

This wasn’t a sustainable way to live. In hindsight, she should have come clean with Dave right from the start, told him: This is me, take me or leave me. This is what you’re getting into, if you want to be with me. Here’s what you should know.

But now it was too late to have that conversation. Telling him the truth now, because she was worried she’d be caught out, was weak and would only make everything worse. So she’d slip away from him instead, she had decided: write a brief note of apology, get in her car and take off somewhere new. Start over. Try and get it right next time. He seemed distracted by the news he’d had about John that morning, she figured. He’d get over her soon enough.

Dave deserved better than her anyway. Look at him, how delighted he was that his parents seemed to have sorted out their differences and were coming home together from Madeira, the second honeymoon finally completed! He believed in true love and sailing off into the sunset with someone, and it was only right that he should find an uncomplicated woman who could give him everything he wanted from life, a woman free from baggage and police interviews and prison-contained ex-husbands.