‘Lyssa, don’t you think it’s a bit late for that?’

‘No.’ I don’t. ‘You only told me about your feelings this morning, Jake. At least give me the chance to talk it through with you.’

‘What else is there to say?’

My knuckles are white where I’m gripping the phone. ‘We can’t just end like this.’

‘It may be for the best.’

‘For who? Not for me.’

‘You’ll be fine, Lyssa.’

‘I’m not fine. I’m dreadful. I want you to come home. Where are you?’

I can sense a hesitation. ‘I’m at Pip’s. I told you.’

‘You said you needed a few days.’ That urgent note of hysteria is creeping back into my voice and I try to stop it. If I want Jake to come back I have to be calm, I have to be collected. ‘Stay until Sunday. I’ll ring you.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t have suggested it.’

‘I have to go,’ Jake says firmly.

‘Why? Why? What else do you have to do?’

‘This isn’t doing either of us any good, Lyssa.’

‘Then why are you doing it?’

‘Because I have to,’ Jake insists and he hangs up. Just like that. He has cut me off. Cut me out of his life. Cut my heart out.

I put the phone down before I drop it in the bath. The water’s chilly now, all the soothing warmth gone from it, and I should get out, but for some reason I seem unable to move. Jake really has gone.

‘Jake’s gone.’ Even saying it out loud doesn’t make it register fully. And I know that, in theory, he went this morning, but on one level I didn’t think that he actually meant it. I thought that he’d spend the day sulking at work, that Pip would give him a good talking-to and after a few fortifying beers in the local pub, he’d come home, tail between his legs, and that would be the end of it. But no. Jake really has gone.