As soon as it got dark, I went out for my evening walk, the one I never invited Suzi on. I crept past their windows, glad they had shut their electronic blinds. It had snowed, which made things more difficult than usual, but luckily I had good boots and didn’t need to go far. When I got back in I washed my hands as usual and sat down at the laptop, ready to make a new plan.

My husband had never wanted me to go online. He’d persuaded me it was bad for me, would only make my head worse. Probably, he was right, but I needed it now, for my plans. How much easier it was to do research, in this era of social media! People were falling over themselves to tell you their birthdays, maiden names, middle names, first primary schools, all the things you might use as security questions. Nick was the kind of man who would never have changed his name. If he’d done things to women, and I was sure that he had, sure as the frozen ground beneath my boots, they would always have been under the guise of romance, or protectiveness, or love. So that the woman – and I was sure there would be several – would never tell anyone, certain that the problem was with her. Sure that she was somehow defective, as he kept on telling her. Believing she was going crazy when he denied the truth of her eyes and ears. Now that I had the internet, I had learned there was a term for this – gaslighting. And Nick, I was sure, was the gaslighting type.

I scrolled back through Nick’s old photos, and quickly identified two women he’d been in relationships with before Suzi. They both had a similar look to her, pale and a little quirky, a flower beside Nick’s dull, neutral-coloured stem. One, a Catriona Murray, seemed to live in Canada now – her profile picture showed a woman in ski gear, on top of a mountain. I clicked through pictures of the other, Lisa Ragozzi, with Nick at the Taj Mahal, on the Trans-Siberian, toting backpacks and wearing tie-dyed trousers. A university relationship, I deduced, which had carried on for a while in the real world, then floundered.