“The thing is, I fell in love with Luke, not Cary. Fell for the sheen and the sweat, the adrenalin of the hunt. Faltered, reeled, collapsed. There was no falling with Cary. Loving him was gradual and logical, inevitable as the path of a glacier. But Luke was a thunderclap, appearing out of a clear blue sky, soaking me to my skin, then moving on leaving everything looking different. And post-Luke nothing was the same.”

“I’m not proud of any of this, truly I’m not. Looking back I can’t believe how I acted, how each deceit flowed so seamlessly from another. My only excuse is that I was addicted, and like any addict all I could think about was my next hit. Hurting Cary didn’t seem of any consequence, neglecting Sarah or my work was unimportant. All that mattered was Luke and the singing in my veins whenever we were together.”

“Chemistry is an overused word. I prefer ‘fit’, that indefinable sensation when a man takes your arm as you move through a door, or leans into you to light your cigarette. (I gave up smoking for Cary and sometimes I still miss it.) Fit is an understanding between bodies: that you’ve been designed the same way, that you speak each other’s language, and fluently. It’s all about physical compatibility and has nothing to do with whether you’ll last or even have anything to talk about afterwards; fit is no relation to the brain, and only a distant cousin of the heart.”

“Oh, I already loved my husband, of course, but this was different. That had been a decision; this was out of my control, an impulse as difficult to resist as gravity. Mad love, crazy love, drop, sink, stumble. The kind of love where every little thing is a sign, a portent: the song on the radio, his Christian name staring up at you from a magazine you’re flicking through, your horoscope in the paper. Normally I don’t even believe in horoscopes, for God’s sake. Love without holes or patches or compromises, soft as an easy chair, a many splendoured thing.”

“That’s the thing about falling. It doesn’t go on indefinitely, and it rarely ends well . . . plunge, plummet, pain. Even if you get straight back up, even when you regain your footing, after the fall nothing is ever quite the same.”

“Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine.”

“If I let myself think of it the pain and anger were still fresh, adrenalin racing down my limbs to pool, hot and itchy, in fingertips and toes.”