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like the little dot he always puts after his initial. I like his vulgar email address, [email protected], and his habit of putting two asterisks on either side of a word or group of words to convey insistence.
    Have you found out something about me?
What did he mean by that?
    What should I do?
    No one to ask, or answer, apart from myself. At one time, I’d have told Melissa. I told her everything, before she resigned from her position as my confidante.
    There is no one I can think of – not one single person in my life – who would be interested in discussing the changeable writing style of a man who goes by the name of ‘Mr Jugs’ in order to seek anonymous physical gratification online.
    If I ever did muster the courage to tell anybody, I would get no useful analysis, and plenty of soul-destroying condemnation: from my female friends, my brother, my parents; from Adam, assuming he’d speak to me ever again if he knew the truth, and not simply throw me out on the street in horror. And – though I hate to think about it – I would get shock and disgust from Sophie and Ethan too. They might only be ten and eight, but they understand what betrayal is even if they wouldn’t use the word.
    My children. Who are downstairs. Who believe I’m looking after them because all three of us are in the house at the same time and I’m the adult
.
    Tears fill my eyes as a violent internal current sweeps my breath away. This used to happen a lot before I stopped emailing Gavin, often when I was sitting here, in front of the computer screen: a sudden flood of realisation that something terrible is happening – something precious is being irrevocably destroyed – and, though it’s my fault, I can’t stop it. I have no control.
    Four or five seconds later, my eyes are dry, and I can breathe easily. I couldn’t recreate the doomed feeling if I tried; it’s as if it never happened.
    I press my eyes shut so that I can’t see the computer in front of me, and wish that the Internet had never been invented. I tell myself that I absolutely mustn’t –
must not
– email Gavin, for the sake of my family, but instead of hearing my own voice saying the words, I hear Melissa’s, which blend with the sand-haired policeman’s, though neither of them has ever said those words to me.
    Their judgement, though I’ve conjured it out of nowhere, is too heavy a burden to bear. I can only escape if I defy it outright.
    I should reread Gavin’s messages once more before writing to him – allow their significance to sink in. There might be something I’ve missed …
    No. No time.
Adam will be home any minute. And Gavin has waited long enough to hear from me. I might still matter to him as much as I did when he sent those emails; by tomorrow, he might have stopped caring. I don’t want to leave it too late.
    I open his most recent message and press ‘reply’. My fingers are numb, unreliable. It takes me three attempts to manage ‘Hi Gavin’ without typos. Then I delete it and write, ‘Dear Gavin,’ instead. ‘Hi’ is too casual.
    I’m so sorry I haven’t replied before now. Until today, I haven’t opened my Hushmail account for more than three weeks. I decided I couldn’t do what we were doing any more. It was nothing you did wrong, so please don’t worry about that. I don’t want to go into detail, but I had a minor skirmish with the police that was kind of linked to my involvement with you. It shook me up and I lost what little courage I had. I decided we had to stop before something irreversible happened. In an ideal world, I would love for us to be in touch again. You saved my sanity and brought unexpected pleasure into the darkest patch of my life. But it’s just not possible. Once again, I’m so sorry. I wish you all the very best. N x
    I press ‘send’, wiping away my tears with my other hand. There. I’ve done the right thing for once. I’m glad the urge to behave honourably doesn’t seize me more often if this