It was almost heart-breaking, this remembering of things I’d said years back. Like a new lover, not a husband of three years. Guilt was like a stone on my chest. Now, I sat down on the expensive chair, uncomfortably far away because of my bump, and turned on the computer he’d bought me. I started, as always, by clicking through every story on the local news. There was nothing. A domestic violence case in Medway, but that was a woman murdered, strangled by her ex-husband. A child attacked by a dog in Hastings; a terrible thing, that made me shut down the window with shaking hands. No accidents, no raging house fire that killed a local man, no pile-up on the M25 – nothing to explain your silence. No sign of your name, anywhere, even though I’d trawled the staff lists of every hospital nearby. Sometimes, in my more crazy moments, I imagined you’d died on your way home, that last day. I knew this was stupid. It was just so hard to take in, when the last thing you said to me was, don’t worry, we’ll be together. Soon, all the prints you’d left on my life – a hair caught in my scarf, the marks of your fingers on my phone screen when you picked it up once – those would all be gone, as if I’d never known you at all. Like a ghost.

I had googled your name a few times too, despite the danger – it was easy to find out what someone had searched for, I knew. I had even, though it was stupid given I didn’t know her name, looked for Sean Sullivan wife. Because sometimes, when I got really crazy indeed, and the fear and sadness were replaced by pure rage, I thought about finding her and telling her. Turning up outside your house, showing her the hoarded messages in the secret account, and bringing it all tumbling down. Of course, Nick would know then too. I’d be burning my life to the ground along with yours. I had no money, no job, and I was pregnant. It made no sense.

But that didn’t stop me thinking it.

Nick and I had moved here as part of our new life. London had broken us and we’d broken each other, and it was starting to feel as if our MDF-filled flat in Shoreditch, traffic thundering outside and sirens going all night, was like being walled in together. I was working, he was working. I drank too much cheap white wine with colleagues in darkened bars, and eventually it seemed normal to stay out with certain of these colleagues instead of going home to recrimination and silence. It was make or break, and we decided make. So when he came home one night and said I was to take the next day off, I acquiesced.