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FORTY-EIGHT THREE YEARS EARLIER

I called Martha while I waited for my train to Enderford.

“Martha, I am so, so sorry to do this to you, but I am going to need a place to sleep, just for a few days. I know we’ve been talking about perhaps moving in together, and I know, obviously, that we were talking abstractly and that it wasn’t meant to be a plan of action, and I know that you have the boys and the shop to think about, and I would not in a million years ask if it wasn’t urgent. But it kind of is?”

She didn’t even ask me any questions. She just said, “Yes. Of course. Come now. Stay as long as you like.”

And nearly a year later, I am still here.

Life with Martha is everything I’d dreamed it would be.

Village life suits me. Martha suits me. She is so uncomplicated and kind.

The boys are sweet enough. The seasons come and go through the windows of her cottage like greeting cards: cherry blossom, sunset-hued roses, rhododendron, holly and ivy, a curtain of Virginia creeper on the wall opposite the kitchen window that turns bonfire red in early autumn.

I help her out in the shop when I can. The rest of the time I go to work.

She still thinks I work for the hospitality training company I told her about last year.

She thinks I travel the country staying in snazzy hotels, training up shiny-faced teams of graduates and school-leavers to face the public and provide five-star service.

She thinks I’m important. She’s proud of me.

I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt a bit that she’s proud of a fictional version of me and not the real me—the me who has spent vast swathes of the last thirty years visiting women around the country, being paid to make them feel good about themselves.

It’s a line of work I’ve fallen back on often over the years.

And I never ever get used to it. It’s degrading and it’s hard and it’s ridiculous.

It doesn’t always involve sex; it frequently involves other things like massages or city breaks or yoga classes or shopping.

I charge ￡200 an hour, ￡500 for an overnight, and I earn every bloody penny of it.

You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that a man would enjoy pleasuring women for money.

But that depends entirely on the woman, and frankly, most of these women are not in my league in any way.

Some of them are downright revolting. This was bad enough when I was with my previous wives but is even harder to stomach now that I am with Martha.

But one good thing about my line of work is that I get to stay in a lot of hotels in a lot of different places.

I get taken out for dinner to some amazing restaurants, and I come home fully versed in the details of the types of places I tell Martha I have been working in as a trainer.

I can bring home souvenirs: matchbooks, bathroom miniatures, after-dinner macarons in tiny boxes tied with ribbon.

I can describe hotels, high streets, tourist attractions.

But I can’t keep doing it. I simply can’t.

I’m almost fifty-two now and I want more, for me, and for Martha.

Unlike Tara, who was ambitious and hardworking, Martha is ambitious, hardworking, and also incredibly creative.

Her mind never stops working. She has such plans for her flower shop, such visions, and I want to be a part of them.

I want to marry her. I want to make a life with her, but I need to take things slowly, stay under the radar, keep my head well and truly down.

Because my recent history is still too complicated to take the next steps.

Emma, Tara’s daughter, reported her mother as a missing person about a month after I moved in with Martha.

I’d sent Emma a few messages from her mother’s phone in the days after she died, told her a long and convoluted story about being in the Algarve, making a fresh start with Jonathan, wanting a clean break, and obviously Emma didn’t believe a word of it, her replies to these messages were full of skepticism and unsuccessful attempts to trip me up, but it took her a while to feel uncomfortable enough about it to report it to the police, by which time there was nobody to answer the door when the police came calling at Amanda’s flat and I was long gone.

It’s almost a year on and Emma is still looking for her mother. She’s forever popping up on the news, campaigning for further police investigations into her mother’s disappearance, but nothing has ever broken the case.

Amanda, of course, is still a problem, but nobody seems to be looking for her, and for now at least everything feels safe, everything feels perfect.

That is until one crisp morning in late February when the apple trees outside Martha’s cottage are bare and gnarled against a sky so blue it looks like gouache and a news report appears on the screen of my phone.

A body has been found in woodland in Essex. A woman’s body. No head. No hands. No legs. Just a torso. Roughly fifty years old. No physical identifiers. Could be anyone. But I know who it is. Of course I do.