Christian sat up, the blood draining from his face. ‘Oh, God.’

‘I didn’t go through with it,’ I said quickly. ‘I swear on Marlon’s life that I didn’t pay anyone to have James Caine killed. It didn’t go that far. It was purely academic, of course, and strictly in the interests of research, and a nod to poetic justice. But I thought about it – a lot. When things were at their worst, their very worst, I could not stop thinking about it. I was obsessed with the idea. I was desperate, Christian. I thought I was going mad.’

When I thought James Caine had given me a disease that I might have passed on to my blameless husband, when Caine had made my life a living hell, when he made me want to kill myself. Yes, I wanted the rotten bastard dead then and I was willing to pay above the going rate, whatever that might be.

‘That’s enough to get you locked up, Tara. That’s enough to get you sent to jail. That’s enough to smash this family to pieces.’

‘I know! But I was at the end of everything and I was scared and I thought I was going to lose you and Marlon and everything I love.’

I wanted him to take me in his arms and to tell me that he understood, I wanted him to tell me that he loved me still, I wanted to hear – I am yours and you are mine.

‘You brought all of this into our home,’ he said instead.

And he meant more than the phone. He meant all of it.

‘Get rid of it,’ Christian said.

29

Tara

‘I have to ask you – is the Accidental Dater for real?’ Sophie Sherman asked me the following morning. ‘Or is it someone making up these things to hurt you?’

Mr Flat Share – met through: Angel Eyes, I read on my phone, as Phil watched me carefully in his rear-view mirror, the early rush-hour traffic crawling on the Camden Road.

In the restaurant, Mr Flat Share is all charm. And in the cab back to his place, he is all old-world courtesy, even with his tongue down your throat. It is only when you accept his invitation to go back to his shabby rooms that Mr Flat Share shows his true colours. Because his friends are there, and they have had a few drinks, and they are waiting for you.

I lifted my head and sighed. Sophie Sherman was worried what the Accidental Dater’s anonymous blogs were doing to my image and, let’s be honest here, also what they were doing to Sophie’s brand, because it became much harder to present me as another blameless victim of toxic masculinity when my dating app was busy setting up unsuspecting women with toxic males.

And at first it does not seem possible that they are waiting for you, that this has all been planned, that you are their dollop of porn for the evening,