It felt as if my whole life was bound up in Karen’s, the way bindweed coiled around the plants in my garden, a loving choke, pulling them down. Karen and my husband. Karen and my daughter. Karen and my husband’s son. I paced back and forward by Mike’s hospital bed, unable to sit down, my pulse jumping in my veins. I found I was making a list in my head. That guy from college, what was his name? Mark Simons. Karen leading him on, in her flimsy cowgirl costume, dancing close, then running away and hiding. I remembered her leaning against my shoulder, a smell of sweet alcohol on her breath. Oh God, he’s after me now. Poor Mark, blundering about dressed like Luke Skywalker. Of course he thought she was interested. She did it all the time, flirted enough to get their interest, then dropped them. That was all she wanted, the interest, and she took it from them like she was strip-mining, gave nothing back. Had she done it to make Mike jealous?

Other things. Karen travelling down to London with a young Jake, asking for an under-25 discount and saying he was her little brother. That holiday in Crete, a different story every night for the pink-faced boys we got talking to, on her insistence. We’re nurses. We’re sisters. We’re trainee zoo keepers. I do the snakes, she does the alligators. Lies, lies. They came as easily to Karen as smiling. Karen necking the wine from the bottle, her legs bare, her skirt showing her pants. Karen flirting, touching Bill with her chipped pink toes. Leaning over the table, laughing so her shoulders shook, her cleavage wobbling. It wasn’t even that funny, whatever it was.