For the first few days I felt curiously empty, hollow, as though I’d done something immense and it hadn’t sunk in properly. At the same time I felt afraid. I double-locked the front door as soon as I came in every night. I looked for signs that he’d been in the house as soon as I came home, but nothing had been moved or changed. At least, nothing that I could put my finger on.

I thought it had all been easy – I thought that he’d seen sense, maybe he’d not been as bad as I thought, and I found myself thinking that maybe I’d made a mistake; he was great in bed, able to make every time we had sex different, exciting. I considered texting him and asking him to come back, but in the end I just put my phone in my bag, out of sight, and left it there.

I didn’t see him for two weeks after that night. I had been crying at night, missing him, in a bizarre sort of way. It was my problem, I realised, I was the one who was a complete commitment-phobe – no wonder he’d found it hard to be with me. No wonder he’d left and not looked back. I sent him a couple of texts but they remained unanswered. When I rang his mobile it went straight to voicemail.

Two weeks after he’d gone, I had a phone call from Claire.

I was at work, in the middle of completing a presentation that needed to be done ready for the afternoon, and suddenly Claire was on the phone. Her voice was strange, tight. She asked me how I was.

‘I’m okay, love. Are you okay?’

‘I just think you’ve made a huge mistake, that’s all.’ I could hear tears, somewhere not too far away, although she was fighting to keep her composure.

‘A mistake? What do you mean?’

‘With Lee. He told me you’d finished with him. I couldn’t believe it. Why on earth would you want to do that?’

I was about to say something, but she didn’t give me time to get a word in.

‘He told me he was going to take you away on holiday. He said he was so looking forward to it, how you’ve changed his life, how you made him happy when he thought he’d never be happy again. Do you know about his last girlfriend, Catherine? Did he tell you about Naomi? Do you know she killed herself? She left a note asking him to meet her and made sure it was him that found her. He’s never got over it. He told me he still has nightmares about seeing her body. And then he told me that you’d ended it with him, told him you wanted to go out and start seeing people again – how could you do that, Catherine, how could you do that to him?’

‘Wait, Claire – it wasn’t like that – ’

‘Do you have any idea,’ she continued, and she was crying now, gasping in between words, struggling to get them out; I could picture her perfectly, her beautiful complexion mottled with fury, fat tears running unchecked down her cheeks, ‘do you have any idea at all how unfair all this is? I would give anything to have a man like Lee. I would give anything at all, anything in the world, to have someone be as devoted to me as he is to you. He loves you, Catherine, he loves you more than anything. You have absolutely fucking everything in the world, and you’re just throwing it all away, and – and – breaking his heart in the process. I can’t bear it.’

‘It’s not like that, really,’ I said at last.

She’d finally run out of things to say, just the odd sob and endless sniffing. At least she hadn’t hung up.

‘You don’t know what it’s like with him. He follows me around. He lets himself into the house when I’m not here…’

‘You gave him a key, Catherine. Why would you give him a fucking key if you only wanted him to go in the house when you were already inside it?’

I didn’t have an answer for that. Even I knew it didn’t sound bad, put like that.

‘Do you know what makes it all worse? Even after what you’ve done to him, even after you’ve broken his heart, he’s still completely madly in love with you. He told me all about all the things you said to him, and straight after that he said if I saw you I was to ask you if you’d go and see him. He’s back working at the River. He said he wanted to see you, to check you’re alright. He said he wasn’t going to come to the house because you’d asked him not to. So, you going to go?’

I told her I’d think about it.

Clearly that had been more or less what she’d been expecting, because she gave me a final shot of, ‘I still can’t believe what you’ve done, I hope you’re proud of yourself,’ and hung up.

I cried after that, shutting the office door and hoping to God nobody would come in. Claire had never spoken to me like that before. She was a loyal friend, someone who understood that mates always came before blokes, that whatever a bloke said to you was not usually to be relied on, especially not when a bloke was bad-mouthing a friend.

I went through the rest of the day in a haze of misery. I finished my presentation as quickly as I could and delivered it without any real thought or enthusiasm. Claire’s words spun round and round in my mind. I must have been really wrong, for her to talk to me like that. I thought about what she’d said, about how unhappy he was without me, how much he loved me. I thought about his last girlfriend, this Naomi – he’d never mentioned her name again after that one whisper in the middle of the night – and about why he’d chosen to talk to Claire about her, and not me. And I thought that he must have been through such a lot of misery, and how he’d been happy. How I’d made him happy.

I left work as soon as the presentation was finished, telling them I had a headache, which was the truth. I went home and cried some more, thinking about Claire and how I couldn’t afford to lose one of my dearest friends, one of my oldest friends. Later, when I’d been lying in bed for hours, thinking about it all, I got out of my pyjamas and into the red dress. It didn’t fit me as well as it had done last time I’d worn it – it was baggy around the waist and the chest, as though some large person had stretched it when I wasn’t looking. But I wore it anyway. Slapped on some make-up, and went to the River looking for him.

What I really wanted, despite everything, was a repeat performance of that time when he’d fucked me in the office at the River. I wanted him to look at me as though I was the most perfect creature he’d ever laid eyes on, I wanted him to take me by the hand and haul me down the corridor to the office, as though he couldn’t wait another second to get inside me.

He was laughing and joking with Terry, the door supervisor, when I walked past the queue of people and up to the VIP entrance. My chest tightened when I saw him, short blond hair cropped close to his head, still improbably tanned despite the cold and the rain; that dark suit, well-cut, defining the muscles and the shape of his taut body.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Catherine. What are you doing here?’ he asked. He was trying to sound cold, but already I’d seen the reaction in his eyes.

‘I was hoping you might let me in so I could join my friends,’ I said, giving him a smile and a barely perceptible wink.

Terry came over. ‘Sorry, love, it’s packed in there tonight. You’ll have to queue like everyone else.’

I wasn’t about to be joining the ranks of the queuing public. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll go somewhere else instead.’ I gave Lee one last lingering look, and walked in the direction of the town centre.

In fact I found the nearest taxi and went straight home. Sure enough, at three in the morning, I heard him knocking at the door.

‘Why didn’t you use your key?’ I said as I opened the door. I didn’t get time to ask anything else, and he wasn’t going to reply.

He took my upper arms and pushed me backwards into the living room, not bothering to turn the lights on, not bothering to shut the front door behind him. He was breathing hard, and when I touched his face it was wet. I kissed him, licking the tears away from his cheeks. He let out a rasping sob and devoured my mouth, kissing me so hard I could taste blood. With a grunt he gave me an almighty shove which sent me sprawling onto the sofa, and before I could say anything else he’d pulled my pyjama bottoms off, undone his suit trousers so quickly and clumsily that I heard the button ping off. I just had time to think, this is going to hurt, and then he was fucking me. When he pushed into me, I cried out.

Did I say no? Not that time. Did he rape me? Not really, not that time. After all, I’d opened the door to him. Earlier in the evening I’d been to the nightclub with the intention of getting him to fuck me. Now he was fucking me, and I didn’t feel I had any right to complain about it.

But it hurt. The inside of my lip was cut from where his mouth had invaded mine; the next day I was so sore I could barely walk. But he was back, at least for a few hours; when I woke up the next morning, he’d already gone.