For me, it was his T-shirt, I think, that started me off. It was the same one he’d worn the night I’d slept with him. As he lay on the hallway floor I had a sudden memory of him lying on their spare-room bed. I’d pushed his T-shirt up and was kissing his chest. I knew how that T-shirt felt. I knew how his skin felt beneath it. I’d felt his heart beat hard against my mouth and had known he was excited and terrified. It was the same for me. And now I knew it wouldn’t beat again. That’s what made me cry.

The police were so nice to us. Much nicer than we deserved. The ambulance crew disappeared as soon as the police arrived. They’d established Tom was dead; he’d died immediately when his head had hit the tiled floor. They told us over a thousand people in the UK die from falling downstairs every year. Many of them are drunk, and they said they could smell alcohol on Tom’s breath. Ruby told them that she thought she’d heard him in the kitchen, having a sneaky drink while he made some coffee, and the police officer found vodka in a glass in the dishwasher.

The police called the duty undertaker and then called in a crime scene manager, who secured the house. A photographer arrived to take photos of the scene before Tom was taken away, but I was in the living room and Ruby in the kitchen by then, giving brief statements. I told the officer I was pregnant and he hurried to make me some hot, sweet tea. I had to force myself to drink it and when I was sick they thought it was because Tom had died.

Ruby looked to be in shock when she came back into the living room; her face was so pale I thought she’d faint. She looked at me as though she hardly recognized me, which wasn’t surprising, really, but while we waited for the undertaker to arrive she let me sit next to her and hold her. After Tom was taken away, the police locked up the house and kept the keys. They said she could have them back in a few days and she seemed too stunned to respond. We stood outside the house afterward. Our cars were parked next to each other and we sat in her car for a while, neither of us knowing what to do. We swapped numbers, just as though we were normal people, as though we didn’t have this history between us. As though we hadn’t slept with each other’s husbands and covered up the death of hers. She was going back to her flat, she said. It seemed like she had no one she could call on. Nobody she could talk to. It was exactly the same for me.