On her palm was one jagged half of her left front tooth, smashed by the elbow of her beloved. She’d found it, thankfully, with the help of the feminists, who suddenly liked her again cos she was bleeding. She couldn’t turn up at court looking like this – and this did not look good. The toothlessness aged her by thirty years and would add a further thirty months to Roddie’s sentence if found guilty.

Mary superglued her tooth in front of the bathroom mirror. She held her mouth wide open and fanned her teeth for sixty cat-dog seconds, then checked her dental work. Her left tooth was very clearly in two pieces, which very clearly did not quite match. She yanked at her Picasso tooth-work, but the glued piece wouldn’t come out. Fuck.

She phoned Bella Brava and ordered seven bottles of wine and ten portions of cold lasagne.

Wine – yep.

‘Rescue’ playlist – tick.

House cleaned – tick.

Bath – done.

Clean sheets, candles, and a sad sneeze of a wank – tick.

1.00 p.m., and Mary had done everything she could to stop the itching. Sex and The City: The Movie didn’t help, even the wedding dress shoot. Bella Brava red wasn’t working either, but she decided to try harder.

The moisturiser burned her scratched calves, and she used it as an excuse to scratch again. She had to clear her head, make an action plan and fix this. Fuck it, everything can be fixed, even thoughts, allegedly, if you have a flipchart.

Mary had three under Jack’s bed. She’d thought about stealing them from work but had in fact ordered them online, because she loved them and had naively always hoped for a moment like this. She assembled the flipchart with a lot of heavy breathing then couldn’t remember why she’d done it, jumping wholeheartedly into an alternative and excellent reason for the flipchart being there:

REASONS TO LIVE

Mary wished she hadn’t worded it exactly that way, it’s not what she meant, and she shouldn’t have used red felt-tip and capitals and underlined it. It looked suicidal and she wasn’t. Granted, she’d been thinking about death a great deal: of the different ways it might happen. And she’d accidentally tunnelled into a Netflix sub-genre about creative people, such as poets and painters, who have lots of fun then kill themselves. Once, after re-watching The Hours, she got in the car and drove to Troon beach. She removed her shoes and socks and walked on the wet sand until her toes reached the water. It was bloody freezing.