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.

And so, while Dave went off to the airport on Sunday to welcome home the second-honeymooners, Bunny looked around the quiet house one last time, took a deep resigned breath and decided to make her move. She didn’t have much to pack – a sports bag or two of clothes, a few pieces of jewellery, the card from Chloe, her make-up and toiletries. Her cardboard doppelgänger could stay, she decided scornfully, folding the huge, sad figure in half and treading it down, before stuffing it into the recycling box.

Dave, you’re the loveliest man in the world and the best thing that ever happened to me, she wrote on a piece of paper, feeling tears starting to gather in her eyes at the thought of him coming back and finding her gone: