You were dead. I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, so I kept talking to you, inside my head, where no one would ever hear it or see it, where I couldn’t forget to log out. The thing that had crossed my mind in my maddest moments, as an explanation for where you’d gone, but even then I’d known I was just kidding myself. But it was true. On the way from our last meeting – when you dropped me off at the side of the road, promising to tell her that night, and I ran home, terrified and excited at the same time – you had driven towards the slip road for the M25, but before you could reach it you had, on the deserted country lane, wrapped your car around a tree. Later that day, in hospital, you had been pronounced dead. I had looked it up and finally found the news reports I’d dreaded all this time, under the correct name. Patrick, that was your name. Not Sean.

It said in the reports police didn’t understand why – it was a mild day, nothing in the weather that would have made you crash, no other cars nearby. I thought you must have swerved to avoid an animal. A dog maybe, or a wild thing like a rabbit or fox. An innocent killer. I couldn’t stop replaying what they’d told me at the hospital. The worst ten minutes of my life, even worse than what happened with Damian and after. I didn’t know if I’d ever get over it. And below the huge, horrific fact of your death, which had punched a crater right through me like a meteorite, there was another – you had lied to me. Your name wasn’t Sean. And you were not a doctor at all.

‘I don’t understand.’ I’d said this at least five times in as many minutes. I was sitting on the chair in the office of Andrew Holt – the real Andrew Holt – an untouched plastic cup of machine tea in front of me. He was hovering kindly above me, while the other man – a Dr Conway, who I had gathered was an anaesthetist of some kind, the man who gave the epidurals, perhaps – stood shiftily in the doorway. ‘He’s not a doctor? He wasn’t?’ The shock had messed up my tenses.

‘A doctor, no, nothing like.’ Conway sounded scornful. ‘He worked in admin.’ He spoke to Dr Holt. ‘You remember him, the pen-pusher who came around with the expense forms. He went by Patrick here. I think Sean was a middle name.’ Was nothing you’d told me real? Patrick Sullivan, not Sean Sullivan.

‘Oh, right. I didn’t realise he died, how awful.’ Dr Holt sounded merely surprised, whereas for me it was the worst news of my life.

‘There was an email. We sent flowers.’

‘I guess I should really start checking them.’