Except… I couldn’t help thinking about Layla Alami, who blamed herself, and her family. The knowledge that I had inadvertently caused such a horrible chain of events was impossible to forget. I sometimes lay awake at night wondering if there was a way to make it up to them. Hoping that, unlike me, they had genuinely been able to move on.

It was months later, in November, when Nora received a message from NoraShark33:

I know who you are.

An arpeggio of unease scrabbled up my back and gripped onto my throat. Lucy blocked them. I spent the whole night staring at the ceiling and praying it wasn’t true.

A week later, from NoraShark34:

I know who you are and I know where you live.

No worse than a hundred other messages I’d had that year, but I deleted it with trembling hands.

Three more followed in the run up to Christmas:

Are you going to share your secret, or shall I do it for you?

Which one is the real you? The hateful bitch who destroys lives or the dreary coward who hides behind her?

Did you enjoy your goat’s cheese pizza? If you did, will you tell everyone you hated it anyway?

That one sent me running for the bathroom, stomach heaving. I had ordered pizza the night before at an Italian restaurant a few streets away from Marcus’s flat. It was the first time I allowed the proposition that this person was telling the truth to actually settle, instead of batting it away as the usual empty drivel.

Christmas Eve, NoraShark38 sent a picture of the dress I’d worn to a party the evening before. So that was a relaxing few days spent at the Tufted Duck, smiling and pretending everything was merry and bright as I flipped mince-pie pancakes while battling semi-hysteria.

I wondered about speaking to the police, but what could I say? The messages contained no explicit threats, they were sinister, but exposing my real identity was my problem, not a matter for the law.

December twenty-ninth, the day I got back from Windermere:

Nice trip home?

The next day:

Maybe now you’re back it’s time to discuss your plans for the new year.

All these messages were, of course, squashed in between countless others, ranging from gushing invitations to parties through to yet more of the usual violent vitriol. These felt different, though. And after that last one, a tendril of fear coiled around my lungs, constricting every breath. Only once Marcus had picked me up and we were safely over the Severn Bridge and well on the way to our New Year’s Eve party could I suck in enough oxygen to think straight. With Marcus’s solid presence beside me, in the warm glow of the beautiful castle, surrounded by people who dealt with this sort of crap all the time, I was able to regain my perspective. Someone out there really hated me, but I could hardly blame them.

After arriving back in London a single woman, I let Lucy deal with the social media side of things while I cried, wallowed and tried to yank myself together and finally come up with a plan to move forwards with my life.