Eleanor Treadway. Your wife, the faceless woman I had been jealous of for so long. I felt it was her stealing you from me. I got angry every time you emailed me secretly from the garden centre, or the house, or the shops. All I could think was how I’d never get to go to garden centres or Ikea with you. I got so used to it, checking my secret email account while Nick was paying for coffees or filling the car with petrol, shielding my phone with my hand or hair, always wanting something different than what was there. Never wanting to be where I was. It got to be an everyday pain, like walking around on a broken leg you don’t even notice. A new lover is like a mirror, you see. One you can’t stop gazing into. I was in a sort of daze of the senses – your smell and the feel of your muscles under the velvet of your skin, the shallow breaths you took as you gripped me, on those rare moments we were together – Oh God, Suzi. As if by saying my name you were saying: It’s you I choose, you and no one else. That’s what you tell yourself when you’re having an affair – even though, of course, you wouldn’t be there in that sterile hotel room if there weren’t other people, Nick and your wife, that blank hot spot behind my eyelids I couldn’t bear to look at but couldn’t stop seeing. But those moments, when I managed not to think about the truth . . . it was that I missed more than anything.

I had known so little about her back then – a black-haired woman in her forties. In my head she was blowsy, anxious. In my head you needed to leave her for me. In my head she was a ghost. Now I knew who she was. So many names she had gone under, that pale intense girl in the pictures. I had to find out what had happened in her past. I had a feeling it would tell me exactly how much danger I was in.

Eleanor

Eleanor

It was so long since I’d been up to London I was surprised by the rush of energy I got as the train crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the Thames wide and silty below me, hundreds of people hurrying about their important lives. It reminded me that other people had jobs, and children, and worries about the strange drip in the bathroom and how to pay the gas bill. Not all this melodrama I was throwing myself into. Moving next door to my husband’s mistress? What had I been thinking? I was deranged, by grief and anger and loss. But now I’d started on this path, it had taken me somewhere I didn’t expect, and I had to keep going, because the life of a baby was at stake.