I think what I felt was relief. Finally, I had someone to blame. I could not bring myself to blame him, even knowing I’d been right all along, that there was someone else. He was gone, and the loss eclipsed everything else I might feel for him. I would have given my right arm to have him back, even knowing he wasn’t faithful. But now I had an explanation for how he could veer off the road on a cloudless day. Of course – he hadn’t been alone. The woman had been with him, and somehow she’d caused this to happen. I had looked and looked at the stretch of road he died on, staring at it on Google Maps for hours, and there was nothing for miles before it, just a country road with no pavement. Fields. She must have been in the car when it happened. That meant she had likely run from the scene. Maybe if she’d called an ambulance, he could have been saved. Maybe he would still be here with me. She was a criminal, this woman, and she’d betrayed her own husband (I was sure she was married too, much safer that way) and widowed me. I was determined I would find her, and make her suffer like I was suffering.

But how did you find a ghost? I knew nothing. No name, no description, nothing. Just that she owned a sticky tube of cheap lip balm, the kind you could buy in any high-street chemist. There wasn’t even anyone I could ask, apart from Conway, who I certainly wouldn’t. The ‘guys’ from the hospital hadn’t even come to Patrick’s funeral, for all the nights he spent drinking with them.

Then I realised – of course, that had been a lie too. Those were the times he was with her. Even when I thought I knew it all, there were still things I’d deceived myself about.

Something I had learned early on, after what happened in my teens, the fire and Uplands and my escape from it, my reinvention of myself, was that money could fix almost everything. I knew he would have used his phone to contact her. He wouldn’t have had a whole different one – he liked to message her while I was there, in the next room serving up dinner. I remembered the curve of his smile as I watched him, the risk of it all.