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.

She also said it first to Edward, after drinking a particularly delicious strawberry daiquiri. She hadn’t really meant it, to be honest. She meant that she loved strawberry daiquiris.

Actually, now that she thought about it, she always took the lead. She’d written “I love you” on Jon’s thirty-eighth birthday card, and he’d taken forty-two humiliating days to say it back.

It might be safer all round if Patrick said it first.

And then he did.

He stayed at her place one weeknight, and in the morning he was running late for an early appointment. He leaned over the bed, kissed her cheek and said, “OK, gotta go, love you,” before rushing off.

He’d said it in the exact same casual voice that he used on the phone to tell Jack that he loved him. It was clearly a slip of the tongue.

She was pondering this, half amused, when she heard the sound of his footsteps pounding up the spiral staircase. She sat up in bed as he reappeared at her doorway.

“Sorry,” he said breathlessly, his hands gripping the doorjamb. “That was a mistake. Well, no, not a mistake! I was waiting for the perfect moment with moonlight and rainbows or whatever, and now I’ve blown it. Fool.” He slapped his forehead.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her, and looked at her in a way that she didn’t think she’d ever been looked at before, by anyone, lover or friend, as if nobody else had ever concentrated that hard.

He said, “I would like to make something very clear.”

“All right.” Ellen made her face serious.

“I am making this, er, declaration on the record. I am of course prepared to put it in writing if necessary.”