I’d half decided I wasn’t going back to Frances’s office, because it was wrong in every way, but looking back on the evening at Mary’s, I also felt I couldn’t continue like that. From the outside, I probably seemed all right, like a robot that had been fairly well programmed to behave like a human being: I hadn’t made a scene, I hadn’t cried, I hadn’t embarrassed anybody. From my point of view, from the inside, it was a different story.

Perhaps it was a sign of success to make it through the day and then to the end of the evening without cracking up, or screaming, or having a flaming row. But that wasn’t what I wanted from my life, that horrible feeling of dissociation, of acting a part that didn’t belong to me, of being a person I no longer knew. That and not knowing the truth about Greg. They seemed to be separate things, but in my mind they were linked. If I could just discover that Greg and that woman had been having an affair or that they hadn’t, I could start my new life as a real person. If I could find the letter or the email or the postcard that showed he had slept with her, because I had been too much for him or too little, I could be angry with him and maybe, just maybe, forgive him.

SO THE NEXT day I put on clothes that were business clothes, but not too much like business clothes because, anyway, I didn’t own any—you don’t dress up for restoring furniture in the shed in your garden. I selected black canvas trousers with a thin, pale-gray jersey, and tied back my hair in a messy bun, put on earrings, a silver chain around my neck, even eye-liner and mascara. Now I wasn’t Ellie but Gwen: helpful, calm, practical, discreet, ever so mathematical. I took my purse out of my bag; if, for no reason I could envisage, I needed it, I could pretend to have forgotten it. I just took a fistful of cash. I went through my shoulder bag carefully, removing anything that identified me by name. I looked at my left hand. No wedding ring.

At five past ten, when I arrived at her house, Frances opened the door with a smile of such welcome and relief that it made me smile back. “I thought you wouldn’t come,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d hallucinated you yesterday, out of desperation. It’s such a disaster zone. I have to work here but you don’t.”

“I’ll help out for a day or two,” I said. “I’ve got work of my own to get back to, but you’re having a bad time, so if there’s anything I can do . . .”