The burglary changed a lot of things, for me. I never felt safe after that, even when Lee was with me. When he wasn’t there, when I was out in town, or at work, or even just driving from home to work or back again, I kept feeling as though I was being watched. When I was at home, alone, it felt as though someone was in the house.

It didn’t help that I kept finding more and more of my things missing. If it hadn’t been for the burglary I might think I’d just mislaid them, but they were things I didn’t use often and I was fairly sure where I’d left them: my passport, for one. It had been in an old satchel at the back of the wardrobe, along with a wallet containing euros, which was also missing. An old diary. I couldn’t begin to think why that had been taken, but it had. My old mobile phone, which didn’t even work – that had been on the bookshelf in the living room.

Each time felt almost like being burgled all over again.

Lee said it was common in burglaries like this. It was a tidy search, he said. Quite often people had no idea what had been taken. He said there had been several burglaries in my area over the past few months, and some people had been targeted more than once.

He stayed over every night he wasn’t working, and sometimes turned up unexpectedly when he was, letting himself in and scaring me half to death. One night he came in filthy, wearing clothes that stank as though he’d been sleeping rough. He peeled them off in the living room, left them in a reeking pile, and went straight upstairs to shower.

When he came back down he was smelling a whole lot better, and looking much better, too. I made him dinner and afterwards he made love to me downstairs in the living room, gentle, tender, loving. He listened to me telling him pointless things about what had gone on at work, stroked my hair away from my flushed cheeks, kissed my sweaty forehead and told me I was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all week. After that he got dressed again, back into the same filthy clothes, and went back out into the night.

I had another two days without him, no sign, no word, no phone call, and then on the Tuesday I came home from work early. It felt as if someone had been in here again. I had no idea what it was that made me think that; the door was double-locked, the windows all secure and shut, but the house just felt different. I checked everything before I even took my coat off, looking for whatever it was that was out of place. Nothing, not a sign. Maybe I’d imagined it, whatever it was, this presence, the feeling that Lee had been here. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

I cooked dinner and phoned Sam afterwards for a chat. I watched something inane on television. I washed up the plate and the dishes and put everything away. I hummed along to the radio while I did it.

At a quarter to twelve I turned the television off and thought about bed. The house was suddenly achingly quiet with the noise gone. The central heating had gone off an hour ago and it was cold.

I checked the front door and the back door, turning the lights off as I went round. I pulled the curtains open a little in the front room and as I did so I thought I saw something outside: a shape, a shadow, across the road – next to the house that had been up for sale for months and months. A bulky shape, like a man, standing in the dark space between the front of the house and the garage.

I waited for it to move, for my eyes to adjust to the light and tell me what it was.

It didn’t move and the more I squinted at it the more I seemed to remember that there was a bush there, a tree, something. It just looked strange in the dark.

I closed the living room door and turned on the landing light, heading wearily upstairs. I got myself undressed and put on some pyjamas, cleaned my teeth. Turned on the light by the bed and pulled back the covers.

That was it, then.

Lying under the duvet, glaringly colourful against the clean white sheet, was a picture, a photo.

I stared at it for a moment, my heart beating fast.

It was a printed digital photo, of me. I picked it up, my hand shaking so much that the image was blurred, even though I recognised it and knew exactly what it showed: me, naked, on this very bed, my legs splayed, my face flushed and strands of my hair sticking to my cheek, my eyes looking directly at the camera with a look of pure lust, pure seduction, naked desire.

He’d taken this picture on one of the first weekends we spent together; the same weekend we’d fought against the wind on the beach at Morecambe, the weekend he’d told me he loved me for the first time. We’d been messing around with the camera, taking pictures of each other. We’d had fun with them afterwards and he’d let me delete them off the memory card. Clearly not before he’d managed to make a copy.

For a moment I gazed into my own eyes, wondering about the person I’d been then, the person who’d wanted this so much. I looked so happy. I looked as if I was falling in love.

Whoever that person was, it wasn’t me now. I tore the picture into tiny pieces, threw the pieces down the toilet and flushed. The little bits all floated happily to the surface again and danced around like confetti on the wind.