He said you were vain about it, which — I want to apologise for repeating that, but it’s what he said, and it worked, because it’s the kind of small unflattering thing a person only says about someone they actually know.”

I sat on the end of a hotel bed in San Francisco and understood that my husband had spent fourteen months constructing a version of me for forty people, and that he had made her plausible by giving her a flaw.

“There’s one more thing,” Dolores said, “and I’ve gone back and forth about telling you.”

“Tell me.”

“In the February, when he did the second collection. Somebody asked whether we should send you something directly — a card, flowers, whatever, all of us signing it.”

She paused. “And he said yes, and he took the card round himself, and forty-one people wrote in it. It took two days. I wrote in it. I wrote thinking of you every day, with love.”