She sat on the floor of the kitchen, her back against the island, so that even if Max came down he wouldn’t see her with the bottle of wine gripped between her hands. She poured a glass carefully, almost to the top, telling herself that it was normal to struggle to sleep without a drink. Lots of people drank a glass of wine every evening. Two glasses. Three. Her parents drank most nights, and they were grown-ups. And it was wine. Not vodka or gin or something hard like that. She stared at the bottle for a little while, watching the beads of condensation slip down the glass.

Other people could do this. Other people didn’t have a thread from their chest connecting them to the nearest alcoholic drink, yanking and pulling until the urge was satiated. She stared at the glass a little longer, thinking about Max sleeping upstairs, so proud of her for taking a night off. If he came down and saw her now, he would be so horrified. Disgusted. He still saw her as the teenage girl he had fallen in love with at school, the one all his friends had been jealous he was dating. But they both knew that living together, spending every second of every day together, had stripped away the air of mystery that had always hung between them. Without the enemy of their parents or their schools, without her secretive weekend trips to stay with him while pretending that she was with her girlfriends, it was different. The sort of different that some people probably liked. Quieter. Gentler. More normal. But it made Zadie feel as if the air was constricting around her. As if she couldn’t really move.

Would Max be happier with someone else? Zadie had asked herself that question a lot recently. Whenever she went for a long, rainy walk or took a scalding-hot bath, she tried on the idea in her mind. Chloe and Max, as a couple. His parents would like Chloe. She would be impressed by them. And she would be able to sit next to him on the sofa and watch a film and enjoy being close to him without the constant screaming, pounding need for a drink, without feeling that the house was empty and flat and pointless without people inside it.

But Max didn’t belong to Chloe. He belonged to her.

She stood up. The glass was still on the floor. Still untouched. She picked it up gingerly, as if it were hot, and tipped it into the sink. Then, elated with her own triumph, she ran the tap, washing away every last drop so that there was nothing left in the sink.

She had done it.