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at my childhood desk, far too tall for it now, knees knocking against it every time I move, I stare at the paper for a long time. I don’t know where to start. Easier to write a list of what I do have left than what I don’t. That list would be a lot shorter.
    I resolve to be positive. If Lipsy can handle it OK – and she seems to be coping much better than I am – then I can make the effort too. The house will be fixed up and redecorated and I will replace everything we’ve lost with stuff that is bigger and better (or smaller and better), and I’ll be happier than ever before. Maybe Lipsy could help me do up the house, kind of like a bonding exercise for us. That could work. I will pay off all my debts, sort out my mum once and for all, and find a really great man who idolizes me. (I think I’m on to a loser with Joshua but I can’t afford to be too fussy right now.) I tuck my legs under the desk, wincing as I scrape my knees again, and grip the pen resolutely in my hand. I touch it to the top of the page and begin to write: CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT ...

Chapter 4
    It looks like the latest Damien Hurst installation dropped into suburbia. Luckily for them, the houses on either side of mine are completely untouched; though they’re detached, the spaces in between are only just about wide enough to walk through sideways.
    I pick my way along the path, pull aside the makeshift boarded door and enter a world of darkness. This can’t be the same house, I think to myself, shaking my head in wonder. It can’t be the house I’ve lived in with my beautiful daughter for thirteen years. The house I decorated lovingly in apple green and duck egg blue, came home to every night, good days, bad days, always there to welcome me with a glass of chilled Pinot Grigio. I have a vision that my house has been beamed up by aliens and replaced by this impostor as some kind of cruel cosmic joke. Somewhere, in a galaxy far away, little grey men are sitting around my kitchen table laughing their oversized grey heads off and drinking my wine.
    The smell that hits me as I cross the threshold is stale and musty like a house that’s been abandoned for months, not days. Three steps take me into the lounge, and I wait for my eyes to adjust after the morning sunlight. Only a little of that light creeps through the filthy windows. Every visible surface is a sooty, dirty brown, and there is nothing familiar to be seen.
    The floating sensation I had on Saturday envelops me again. When I last came in here, only a few hours after the fire had finally been put out, a fireman had tried to warn me what to expect. He’d said that the heat and smoke damage was extensive. And then there was the water. The damage from the water was almost as bad as the damage from the fire itself. He even gave me a booklet, Recovering From Your Fire or Flood , which Bonnie read from cover to cover. Twice. She also went out and bought a disposable camera and told me to take photographs of the damage. I didn’t know where to start.
    But that was when she thought I had insurance, of course. Without it there was no one to record the devastation for. Except myself. I took the photos anyway. And hoped that one day I could put them side by side with photos of a shiny new house and feel proud of what I’d achieved, and of how well I’d coped.
    I wasn’t coping very well now.
    My house is of the small two-bedroomed variety so common in Milton Keynes. Downstairs there’s a lounge-dining room with French windows at one end and a window overlooking the cul-de-sac at the other, a kitchen and a cloakroom – or downstairs loo, as my mother calls it. Upstairs: two bedrooms and a bathroom.
    I pick my way through to the kitchen, once my pride and joy – Cath Kidston eat your heart out. Pink and blue, bunting and kitsch curtains, my beautiful – if rarely used – Kenwood mixer on the counter. And my wonderful, show-stopping, American fridge-freezer with ice maker and enough room to