Welcome to the Narrow Bed Hotel. There ought to be a sign with those words on it. This is definitely the right place: the Whitworth Hotel in Canterbury.

Everything is the same apart from Liam not being with me: the leaflet rack, the navy fleur-de-lis carpet, the battered skirting boards in the reception area that look as if a gang of thugs in steel-toecapped boots have kicked them hard every day for the last twenty years.

Charlie’s busy asking the receptionist to look at her records and try to find out which room Liam and I stayed in last year. All I can remember is that it was on the first floor. It might have been room 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 or 16.

I don’t understand why Simon needs to know, or why Charlie accepts all his orders without question, as if they’re commands sent from God. Is this what’s required for a successful marriage?

I don’t want to go back into the room Liam and I shared. Even though it has no sentimental value, I tell myself firmly. How could it, when there was nothing special about me and Liam and what we had together? He once bought me a book that was signed by hand and dedicated in print to the same person: so what? Only a fool would make a big deal of that the way I did.

I wanted it to mean that Liam loved me. It didn’t. I wanted his outwardly blank manner to mean that his affection for me was so powerful, he didn’t dare express it for fear it would overwhelm us both. It didn’t.

When I was five years old and still an optimist, my adoptive parents bought me a book called The Stone Doll of Sister Brute. It was about a girl who had nothing to love, so she gave a stone a name, pretended it was a person, and determinedly loved it. That’s what I did with Liam. I was so desperate to believe I could extract love from him. Easy to fool myself that all I wanted was sex; it was all Liam had to offer, so how could I possibly have been hoping for more? I’d have had to be stupid, and I knew I wasn’t. I could prove to myself any time I wanted that Liam meant nothing to me. Evidence of insignificance poured out of all our interactions. I kidded myself that was coming from me as much as from Liam.

Fuck him. Fuck Gabe too, who told me endlessly how much he loved me, when what he really loved was himself and skunkweed, in that order. It’s the opposites thing again; I assumed, because of Gabe, that Liam must love me; he was the one not saying it every time he opened his mouth.