“No, he could put on a great mask.”

“Yeah, they’re never the same in company as they are when you’re on your own with them. But are you sure it wasn’t just because you were in love with Harry and you were comparing them?”

I shook my head. “I almost left a couple of years ago, before I even started working with Harry. I’d just about had enough. And then my mum fell over and broke her arm, so that took me out of the house some, and things were a bit easier. But then a couple of Christmases ago it was awful.”

“What happened?”

“Just an argument,” I said. It had been more than that, though. You know when someone says something and it cuts you to the quick? I was naked at the time and Tom was clothed, which made me feel so much more vulnerable. It wasn’t something I was going to talk to Sarah about.

She reached out and touched my wrist. “Don’t you wear your Fitbit now?”

We both looked down at my wrist. I was wearing a bangle instead; it felt too odd to have nothing there.

“I’ve never seen you without it,” she said. “Where is it?”

“I gave it back to him. He . . .” I knew she wouldn’t understand me, but I’d had enough gin to keep going. “He tracked me all the time.”

“What, where you were?”

“No, it didn’t do that, thank God. He tracked my footsteps.”

She frowned. “What?”

“He would check it, see how many steps I’d taken.”

“Oh, Adam does that,” she said. “We both wear one at the weekend and he’s always checking his against mine. When we went to New York in the summer I did twice as many steps as he did, even though we were together all the time.” She laughed. “That’s the advantage of being so much shorter than him. He never got over it. Said it was much easier for me to do ten thousand steps.”

I knew this story. She’d told me about it ten times. “It isn’t like that, though. He’s always trying to catch me out. Let’s say I go to the shops one Saturday. I walk there, buy the newspaper, walk back again. Then the next Saturday I’ll do it again and he’ll check the steps against the first trip. And then he’ll cause a fight, saying I didn’t go to the shop I said I’d gone to. And one day I didn’t wear it to work. He was convinced I hadn’t gone to work at all. He kept a check of everything I did, Sarah. Every step I took. I couldn’t bear it.”