The months since the Premier Inn have a rhythm now. A secret architecture I've built inside my real life, invisible to everyone but me.

Tuesday nights, when Sam works late, I shut the bedroom door and call Bradley. His face appears on my screen — that warm, tired smile, the grey threading through his beard — and for an hour I forget there's a world outside this room. We talk about nothing and everything. His day. Mine. The way he says my name, low and quiet, like he's saving it for when no one else can hear.

He started asking me to touch myself while he watched. The first time, I almost couldn't do it. My hand hovered over my stomach, frozen by the absurdity of it — me, thirty-three, a teaching assistant, married, spread across the pillows in my own bedroom while a man on a phone screen told me how beautiful I was. Then he said, "Laura," just like that, and my hand moved.

I did it at work once.

During my lunch break, in the disabled toilet at Littleborough Primary, my phone propped against the sanitary bin, Bradley's voice in my earbuds. I kept one hand pressed over my mouth so the teaching assistant in the next stall wouldn't hear. Afterward I sat there shaking, flushed and guilty and so full of him I couldn't breathe. I texted him: That was insane. He replied: You're incredible. I believed him.

And I bought the butt plug. Like he suggested. It's still in my bedside drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, a secret I haven't told anyone. I look at it sometimes, hold its weight in my palm, and wonder what it would feel like with him inside me. The thought makes my thighs press together even now.

But none of that — the calls, the risk, the small rebellions — fills the real space between us. Four and a half hours of motorway. Two different postcodes. A sister. A husband. The whole damn country conspiring to keep us apart.

Then Sam booked the holiday.

"Canary Islands," he said, sliding his phone across the kitchen table. "Two weeks. Half board. Look at the pool."

I looked at the pool. Turquoise and rectangular and ringed by white sun loungers. I thought about Bradley. How he'd been quiet lately, his messages shorter, his smiles on video calls not quite reaching his eyes. I thought about the distance and how two weeks of silence might break something between us.

"It'll be good for us," Sam said, and I nodded, and I hated myself for nodding.

I told Bradley that night, my voice barely a whisper into the dark of my bedroom. "Sam booked the Canary Islands. Two weeks. I have to go."

Silence. His face on the screen went still.

"Bradley?"

"Yeah." He rubbed his jaw. "Right. Of course. A holiday. With your husband." Each word landed like a stone.

"It's just for appearance," I said, the lie already smooth from practice. "We're supposed to look normal. This is what normal people do."

"Normal." He laughed, but there was no humour in it. "Laura, I haven't touched my wife in months. I don't remember what normal feels like."

"I'm still yours." I said it before I could stop myself, the words raw and unguarded. "Even when I'm there. I'm still yours."

He looked at me for a long time. Something shifted in his eyes — the jealousy softening into something else. Need, maybe. Or hope.

"Prove it," he said.

So I did.

Every day in the Canary Islands, I sent him proof.

Day one: a photo of my feet against the tiles by the pool, the edge of my bikini bottoms visible in the frame. Wish you were here, I typed, and meant it desperately.

Day three: I stood in the hotel bathroom while Sam napped, the afternoon sun bleaching the curtains white. I photographed myself in the full-length mirror — my skin already starting to bronze, the floral tattoo across my chest exposed above the V of my bikini top. Sent it to Bradley. Watched the three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

His reply: You're going to kill me.

I smiled all the way back to the pool.

Day seven: a video. Just my hand drifting across my stomach, the small star tattoo near my hip, the line where my tan line was deepening. No face. Nothing incriminating. But my voice at the end, barely a whisper: "I'm thinking of you. I'm always thinking of you."

He called me that night. Sam was at the hotel bar, talking football with a man from Liverpool. I sat on the balcony in the dark, the sea a black murmur below, Bradley's voice in my ear.

"Tell me what you're wearing."

"A sundress. White. Thin."

"Are you wet?"

I didn't answer. I just opened my legs and let him hear it in my breathing.

We stayed on the phone until Sam's footsteps sounded in the corridor. I hung up without saying goodbye, the way we always did. Like spies. Like cowards.

The holiday passed in a blur of sun and salt and longing. Sam and I ate tapas and walked along the promenade and went to bed at the same time every night. He reached for me twice. I let him, because that's what normal people do, and I lay beneath him counting ceiling tiles, imagining Bradley's hands instead.

Guilt sat heavy in my chest every morning. I woke with it, carried it through breakfast, felt it loosen only when I slipped away to message Bradley. By the time we landed back in Manchester, I was exhausted from the weight of it.

The house smells like nothing.

That's the first thing I notice when I push open the front door. Two weeks of absence has leached the warmth from it. The air is still, the post piled on the mat, a single coffee cup in the sink from the morning we left. No one has been here. No one has breathed in these rooms but the plants I forgot to water.

I drop my suitcase in the hallway.

The silence is different from the Canary Islands. There, the silence was full — of waves, of insects, of Sam's breathing beside me in the dark. Here, it's empty. It's the sound of a life I'm not sure I recognise anymore.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

Bradley: You home safe?

I read it twice. Three times. My thumb hovers over the keyboard, and I think about every message I sent him from that balcony, every photo, every whispered confession. I think about the distance between Strood and Littleborough and how it never gets any shorter. I think about the butt plug in my drawer and the Tuesday night calls and the way my body aches for someone who isn't my husband.

It's not enough anymore.

The calls aren't enough. The photos aren't enough. The fantasies and the stolen hours and the elaborate architecture of lies — none of it holds the weight of what I actually want, which is him. Here. Real. His hand on my neck and his voice in my ear and the impossible, beautiful catastrophe of us.

I type: I'm back. I need to see you.

Send it before I can stop myself.