‘That’s it, that’s better – come on. Deep breath. Another. Slower.’

‘I can’t – it’s bad, this – ’

‘It’s fine. I’m here, everything’s alright, Cathy.’

The little scrap of red was lying in the middle of the rug like an open wound. I couldn’t look at it. In the background the television was laughing at my hysteria. I guess it must have looked quite funny to an outsider.

When I was almost calm again he took me with him to the kitchen and made me sit at the kitchen table while he made tea.

‘What happened?’ he said. He was always so unflappable, so bloody composed.

‘It’s that. It was in my pocket.’

Stuart looked across to the rug. ‘What is it?’

I shook my head, side to side, until I started to feel dizzy. ‘It’s – just a button. It’s not that. It’s how did it get into my pocket? I didn’t put it in there. It shouldn’t be in there. It means that he’s been in the flat. He got in and put it in my pocket.’

‘Hey. Come on, deep breaths again. You’re over this, don’t let it get to you again. Here’s your tea, come on, have a bit.’

I had some gulps, burned my throat, felt sick. My hands were shaking. ‘You don’t understand.’

He sat opposite me with his tea, and waited. Always with the unending fucking patience, it got on my nerves. It reminded me of the fucking nurses in that crazy fucked-up excuse for a hospital.

‘Can we just leave it? Please? I’m fine now.’

He didn’t speak.

I drank my tea. Despite myself, I was starting to calm down. I still couldn’t look at it, couldn’t think about it, what it meant. In the end, I managed a whisper. ‘Please could you get rid of it?’

‘I’ll need to leave you on your own for a minute.’

‘Yes. Don’t go far.’

‘I’ll put it in the bin outside. Alright?’

He got up from the table. I put my hands over my face, blocking it out. I kept my eyes screwed shut until I heard the door to the flat shut behind him – he knew better than to leave it open these days – and his footsteps on the stairs. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream and not stop, but I held it in, counted to ten, told myself that it was gone, it was gone forever, maybe it had never been there in the first place, maybe I’d imagined it.

He came back a few minutes later and sat back down at the kitchen table. I drank my tea and gave him a smile that I hoped was reassuring. ‘See?’ I said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just your crazy girlfriend flipping again for no reason.’

He just kept up that steady eye contact. ‘I’d like it if you could tell me,’ he said. ‘I think it’ll help.’

I didn’t answer, wondering if I could say no, and if I did whether he would be satisfied with that or whether he would go on and on and on…

‘This is part of my past. I want to get rid of it, forget about it,’ I said.

‘It’s part of your past that’s clearly having a significant impact on your present.’

‘You think I put it in there myself?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

I bit my lip. My tea was only half-drunk, otherwise I would probably have got up and walked out. In any case, I wanted to go downstairs and start checking, try to work out how the hell he got in.

‘Look,’ he said at last, ‘I’m not trying to get inside your head. I just want to know how I can help. Can you try and forget what job I do and just tell me? I’m not your therapist, Cathy. I’m just the poor bastard who’s in love with you.’

I found myself smiling in spite of it all. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve kept all this in for so long, it’s hard to just let it all out, you know?’

‘I know.’

I got up and went to sit on his lap, folding myself into him and tucking my head under his chin. He put his arms round me and held me.

‘I had this red dress. It was what I was wearing when I met him. He got a bit obsessive about it.’

I had a momentary picture of the dress when I’d bought it, how perfectly it fitted, how I’d had to buy shoes to match. I’d loved it, at first. I’d wanted to wear it all the time.

‘And this button reminds you of the ones on that dress?’

‘Yes – no, it’s more than that. It is from the dress, I’m sure it is – oh, I don’t know!’ I had been racking my memory desperately, trying to picture the dress, the exact size of the buttons, whether the backs were metal or plastic. I veered from absolute certainty that it was, back to doubt. Of course, now the button was outside in the bin I couldn’t check. There was one thing that was beyond question, though. ‘It’s the sort of thing he’d do, Stuart. It’s exactly the sort of twisted game he used to play. He put that – thing – in my pocket to let me know he’s come back for me.’

Stuart’s fingers were stroking the skin on my forearm, but I could feel tension in him, in the way he was holding me. I was waiting for him to say it. It’s just a button. It doesn’t mean anything.

‘You could have picked it up somewhere,’ he said gently.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t just pick things up. Do you? Do you just go around randomly picking up other people’s crap? No? I don’t either.’

‘Maybe it got mixed up in your washing,’ he said, ‘at the launderette. It’s tiny. It could have been left in the washing machine by whoever used it last. It was all twisted, wasn’t it? Perhaps it got caught in the machine or something. Isn’t that a possibility?’

‘Whose side are you on?’

I got up, suddenly suffocated by his arms around me. I crossed the room and changed my mind and came back again, pacing, trying to stop the panic and the anger and the sheer, dreadful hopelessness of it all.

‘I didn’t realise there were sides.’

‘Shut up and stop being such an idiot!’ I shouted.

He shut up. I’d crossed a line and felt bad straight away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘You should ring the police,’ he said at last.

‘What for? They won’t believe me,’ I said miserably.

‘They might.’

‘You don’t believe me; why should they?’

‘It’s not that I don’t believe you. I think you’re severely traumatised by what happened, you’re afraid now and that’s making you ignore the fact that there are potentially rational explanations for how it came to be in your pocket.’

‘That’s just the point, Stuart. It was in my pocket. It wasn’t just tangled up in the washing, it was in my fucking pocket. It didn’t just fall in there of its own accord, and I didn’t put it there, he did. Don’t you get it? He used to do things like this. He’d break into my house when I wasn’t there, leave me messages, move things around. Things you wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s why I started the checking.’

‘He’d break into your house?’

‘He was – kind of an expert in it. I never worked out how he managed to get in. He could break into just about any house without you knowing how.’

‘Jesus. You mean he was a burglar?’

‘No. He wasn’t a burglar. He was a police officer.’