I wonder what he thought of her.

She doesn’t really seem like a kid person. Too spiritual and floaty. Children like earthy, real people who get down on the floor and play with them. I can’t imagine someone who talks about “light filling your body” sitting in a sandbox.

I guess Jack is too big for sandboxes now, although it’s still there in their backyard. Sometimes, when Patrick is at work and Jack is at school, I go to the house and eat my lunch in the backyard. I sit there on the garden seat we bought on eBay, where I used to have my morning cup of tea, and I remember when this was my home and this was my backyard and this was my life.

I always told him we needed a padlock for that back gate.

I used to sit in that sandbox with Jack and we’d play with his Matchbox cars for hours. His dad did better sound effects than me, but I was more patient. Patrick was too much like a kid himself. He’d build this amazing racetrack through the sand, with bridges going over lakes, and then he’d get all frustrated when Jack suddenly decided to stand up and stomp on it. I’d say, “Patrick, he’s two years old.”

Jack looked so tall and lanky when he got out of the car at the hypnotist’s place. I was parked across the street. I just stayed there after my appointment with her. I’d had a feeling that Patrick was coming over for dinner. When she’d taken me upstairs, I’d smelled a garlic and wine sort of smell, like something marinating. I didn’t expect to see Jack come too. It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you’re a kid, and you’re hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you cannot believe how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.

I don’t think Jack was especially excited about meeting the hypnotist. He didn’t look too happy. His shoulders were all slumped. I thought I saw him blowing his nose. I hope he doesn’t have the flu. It’s bad for people with underlying conditions like asthma.

Once, when he’d just turned three, and Patrick was away for work, Jack had an asthma attack in the middle of the night and I had to take him to Emergency. I can still remember the terror I felt seeing his little chest heaving as he tried to suck in enough air, and the way his beautiful green eyes fixed on mine, begging me to help him, and then sitting there with him on my lap, trying to stop him from pulling off that stupid little plastic mask while they gave him Ventolin. The doctors and nurses all assumed I was his mother. “How is Mum coping?” “Does Mum need a cup of tea?”

It would have been stupid to have corrected them and said I was just his stepmother. “Does Stepmum need a cup of tea?”

Jack called me Sas, because that’s what Patrick called me. Each night when I went in to say good night, he’d take his dummy out of his mouth (we didn’t wean him off his dummy until he was nearly four, which was very bad; we were soft with him) and say, “I lub you, Sas,” and quickly pop his dummy back in, and every time I felt like my heart would just about explode out of my chest.

Jack was more than I’d ever hoped for, more than I’d ever dreamed.

The night he had the asthma attack, they finally let us go home when the sun was coming up. I didn’t want to put him in his cot, so I took him into our bed, and we both fell asleep. When I woke up, Patrick had got home from his trip, and he was just standing there watching us, with this look on his face, this look of tenderness and love and pride, and he said, “Hello, family.” I’ll never forget that look.

Two years later, three weeks after Jack started school, Patrick said, “I think it’s over.”

“You think what’s over?” I said cheerfully. That’s how unexpected it was. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. A TV series? The summer?

He meant us. We were over.

Chapter 6

“The rejected stalker is often a former intimate partner, with a complex, volatile mix of desire for reconciliation and revenge.” ?!! (Revenge for what? What did he do to her?)

—Scribbled note by Ellen O’Farrell while

Googling “motivations for stalking”

There were no more “micro-expressions,” or if there were, she didn’t catch them. Her doubts drifted away like candle smoke.

The first two weeks of July were glorious that year: shiny, blue-skied winter days as crisp and crunchy as apples. It was the perfect weather for a new relationship, for holding hands on public transport, for the sort of behavior that makes the recently brokenhearted want to weep and everyone else roll their eyes.

Ellen collected memories: a remarkably lustful kiss pressed up against a brick wall like teenagers outside the Museum of Contemporary Art; a Sunday morning breakfast when she’d made him laugh so hard other people in the café turned to look; a mildly drunken game of gin rummy that ended in bed; coming home from yoga to find an enormous bunch of flowers lying on her doorstep with a note that said: For my girl.

They stopped being quite so careful with each other. “Jesus,” said Patrick the first time he saw Ellen polish off a giant steak.

“Aren’t you meant to be a good Catholic boy?” said Ellen.

“I wasn’t using the Lord’s name in vain. I was saying, Jesus, did you see what that woman just ate? I thought I was dating a hippie, dippy vegan chick, not a bloodthirsty carnivore.”

“Hurry up or I’ll eat yours.”

There was no sign of Saskia for a while.

“Maybe I’ve scared her off,” said Ellen, who was still idly researching the psychology of stalking whenever she had a spare moment.

“Maybe!” Patrick patted her arm in the kindly, worried fashion of a doctor responding to a terminal patient who says, “Maybe I’ll be the exception to the rule.”

The words “I love you” began to hover in Ellen’s thoughts, like a song lyric she couldn’t get out of her head. She remembered reading somewhere, probably in a stupid magazine article, that it was fatal for the woman to say “I love you” first. Which was the most sexist, superstitious thing she’d ever heard … but still, there was no rush. They’d only been dating for six weeks. The right moment would present itself.

She thought back over her previous “I love you” history.

She’d been the first to say “I love you” to Andy. He’d looked momentarily terrified before he quickly, dutifully said that he loved her too.