There’s not much to look back on, there is so much. Eight years, they’ve been together, Heloise and Ernesto. She can’t remember what it was like not to know him, though he never appears in her dreams.

Eight years. I love you, said over and over, from one to the other, a comfort and a reality: a profound, precious thing. She is destroying it, and poor Ernie has no idea.

Heloise brushes her long hair in the mirror. The same hairstyle—side part, curtain layers—since she was a girl. She isn’t very brave, and she doesn’t pretend to be. A brave person wouldn’t be having an affair. Her hair is pretty, she admits it. She washes it infrequently, because it is less fluffy the longer she waits. It is the colour of straw, or a crumpet. There are a few long white hairs, too, but not many.

Her phone bings from the bedroom. The noise provokes the usual response, her stomach cramping in anticipation. It will be Lacey, she hopes. It is almost always Lacey. It is her noise, her bing, her notification on the telephone screen, her name that Heloise calls out when she is coming on her own, on the bed or in the bath, when Ernie isn’t home. She wonders if she is a sociopath, if Lacey is one, too.

She will wait to check the message. This will be hard, because it feels like Lacey’s messages are all she looks forward to, and that she is simply wading through each day to get to the next one. She knows, though, that most of what she feels isn’t true. She has a life, and tonight she’s going out to dinner with Ernie and some friends of his, who have become her friends, too, in a way. They will meet at a restaurant that serves raw seafood and expensive cocktails, and she will wear her angel-sleeve dress, the one she bought with her credit card because she thought Lacey might like it, and which she hasn’t paid off yet. It is hot—the middle of February, the hottest month in Melbourne—and she likes a breeze between her legs.