I was at home with the boys while this ‘team building’ was going on. They were young then, maybe four and five, as much of a handful as you’d imagine, even without my work and other pressures. It was a despicable betrayal, yes, but despicable in a familiar, classic way, and whatever people say there is a certain solace in knowing others have felt the same pain.

‘Don’t tell anyone else what he did,’ I remember Alison saying, when I confided in her and Merle that I’d decided to forgive him (not quite the right word, but for the sake of argument that’s the one I’ll use). ‘It will change how people react to you far more than how they react to him.’

This was advice I’d have done well to follow, for even as I shared my distress with Polly, I knew it was an error. Naturally resistant to Bram’s charms from the start, she now had evidence to prove her intuition, evidence she was not willing to excuse even when I did. And just as Alison had predicted, Polly instinctively found fault with me. ‘You can’t be attracted to someone so obviously, well, you know, and not expect other people to be attracted to him as well,’ she said.

‘So obviously what?’

‘Sexy, Fi. And restless, you know, in that edgy way.’

‘Is that how everyone else sees him?’

‘Of course they do. He’s a type. A bad boy. However hard he tries, he can never be fully rehabilitated.’

‘That’s stereotypical nonsense,’ I said.

As was the conversation I had with Bram himself.

‘I don’t know if I can ever trust you again,’ I told him.

‘Try,’ he begged. ‘It will never happen again, you have to believe that.’

Trying, trusting, believing: a thousand times more appealing than the alternative when you share two young children. And he was faithful after that, I’m certain he was – until that evening last July.

Was I faithful to him? Very funny. Of course I was. I refer you to the two small children. Even if I’d had the desire to stray – which I didn’t – well, I didn’t have the time.

And no, Polly isn’t married.

Bram, Word document

If you haven’t been told already then you will soon: there had been a prior extramarital lapse. I won’t dwell on that here, because as I say this isn’t about the sex. Love and fidelity are not the same thing, whatever women say. (Again, there’s no need for names. She was a girl at a work event, a one-night thing. She left the company soon after.)

Why did I cheat on the woman I love? The best way I can explain it is that it was not an addiction or even an itch, but more like the memory of hunger after years of good eating. The belief that I was better when I was desperate, my senses sharper, pleasure more intensely taken. A kind of egomaniac’s nostalgia.

I won’t go on. I have no doubt you’re already rolling your eyes. You’ll show your colleague that last bit and you’ll say, ‘I’ve heard it all now.’

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:24:41

By the way, don’t think I don’t know that after that fling with the girl at work Polly called him ‘Wham Bram Thank You Ma’am’.

Pretty clever, I have to admit.

What she called him after the playhouse incident is too shocking for broadcast.

Bram, Word document

When the boys were little and Fi was on the warpath, we used to call her Fee Fi Fo Fum. Affectionately, of course, though it became less so on my part once I’d realized that nine times out of ten the Englishman’s blood she smelled was mine.

6

Friday, 13 January 2017

London, 1 p.m.

The number you have dialled is no longer in service.

‘Any luck?’ Lucy Vaughan asks her.

‘No.’ She needs to get rid of this woman with her fake emails and fantasies about owning someone else’s home. Should she call the police straight away? Or wait till she’s located Bram, so they can tackle this outrageous invasion together? And now that so much of the Vaughans’ furniture is installed, do they qualify for squatters’ rights? Are they, technically, occupiers?

The questions have no answers. They feel as unreal as the images in front of her eyes. The whole experience is hallucinatory, not to be trusted.

She tries Bram a second time. A third.

The number you have dialled is no longer in service.

She can’t even leave him a voicemail. ‘Where the hell is he?’

Lucy watches, her own phone in her hand. ‘You have two children, don’t you? Could he be with them?’

‘No, they’re in school.’ How does Lucy know things about her when she didn’t know Lucy even existed until a few minutes ago?

Mum, she thinks. She’ll ask her to pick up the boys from school and take them back to her place. They can’t come here, they’d be distraught to find their bedrooms gutted, their precious possessions spirited away.

Spirited away where? Owning the house might be this stranger’s delusion (she continues to cling to the notion of a practical joke), but its rightful contents are starkly, incontrovertibly missing. Someone has physically removed them.

This is when it occurs – not a thought so much as an unleashing, a surge of foreboding that breaks into consciousness in the form of full-blown terror: if her property could vanish during her two-day absence, could her children? ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Please, no, please . . .’ With trembling hands, she scrolls through her phone contacts.