‘My best friend,’ she replied, turning back to look at me. Her eyes locked with mine and something unsaid passed between us. We were two thirty-something women who had known each other for four months – I hadn’t had a best friend since school – yet it was still not enough to encapsulate the intensity of my feelings for her.

‘You’d better be careful,’ he said to me, his eyes narrowed, but a smug expression on his face. ‘Don’t you know what this woman is capable of?’

Here we go, I thought. Trying to make out that Daphne was the bad person. The one in the wrong. I’d seen a black-and-white film about it once. What did they call men like him? Gaslighters?

I stood there, shivering in my cardigan and long skirt, not saying anything, just glaring at him in response. He took a puff of his cigarette and blew it out slowly and deliberately in my direction. I felt an intense hatred towards him in that moment. Daphne moved towards him, but I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her back. ‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

She shook her head. I was surprised at her compliance. After all her talk of standing up to men. She shrugged me off, walking towards him. She looked thin in a cotton jumper and flared jeans. She had on her trusty boots and they sank into the grass as she stood next to him, their backs to me. I could smell the hint of a bonfire from a neighbouring garden and, other than the light from the kitchen, it was pitch black outside, the kind of darkness you only get in the countryside with no pollution, hardly any lights and the thick, dense wood at the back. The hedges on either side were high, eclipsing any views from neighbours.

Was I thinking of it then? Planning it? I think on some level I must have been.

I waited by the back door. Watching. Listening. Like an animal ready to pounce. Their voices floated towards me.

‘After all these years,’ I heard him say. I could see the tip of his cigarette; a dot of amber against the darkness, like a firefly. ‘I knew I’d find you. Even with that fucking ugly hairstyle. You can’t hide from me. Jean.’

‘My name is Daphne,’ she said firmly. I noticed how her shoulders tensed. Her neck looked long and elegant with her hair so short. ‘I don’t know why you keep referring to me as Jean. I’m not who you think I am.’

He lowered his voice but I could still hear him. ‘We both know you are.’ His words sounded threatening although I wasn’t sure why. Not then anyhow. ‘Exposing you is going to make my career.’