There is something particularly depressing about a house without heating in January. Not tragic, not dramatic, merely miserable in that thoroughly English way which involves cold radiators, damp towels, endless telephone calls and the growing suspicion that the landlord regards hot water as a privilege rather than an essential feature of civilisation.

We returned from Kraków on 2 January 2025 to discover that a pipe had burst in Laureano's apartment. Water was dripping, the heating had stopped working, and there was no hot water.

The flat, which had become our home only a few months earlier, was now a rather inhospitable place in which to begin a new year.

I have always been reasonably good at solving practical problems. A broken pipe requires a plumber, a landlord requires persuasion, and a cold apartment requires warm clothes until somebody does something about it. None of these things is pleasant, but they belong to a reassuring category of difficulties: problems with identifiable causes and, at least in principle, identifiable solutions.

The other problem in our apartment was considerably less straightforward.

For the first few days after our return, life continued almost as before. Laureano went to work, I attended to my own affairs, and several evenings a week he took his son to football training.

We discussed the heating, negotiated with the landlord and made arrangements for repairs.

There was nothing outwardly remarkable about our routine. Two adults living together, dealing with the minor inconveniences of domestic life.

Yet I was becoming increasingly uneasy.

Something had been happening to Laureano since December. I had noticed it during our Christmas holiday in Kraków, although I had tried to explain it away as fatigue, family complications or the ordinary emotional turbulence of a man whose personal life had changed rather dramatically. He seemed anxious, distracted, increasingly unable to enjoy things that should have made him happy. He was eating less and losing weight. At times he appeared to be listening to something that was not being said in the room.

I knew that people in his professional environment had been talking about me. There had been remarks about my perceived Russian origins, strange insinuations and the persistent suggestion that I might somehow be connected with Russian intelligence.

I found the whole business ridiculous. Then I got tired of this. I got tired of constant Spanish screams with putas and espias, I got tired of watching Salt, and I got tired of thinking about all this nonsense.

Not because intelligence services did not exist, or because people never became involved with them. I was perfectly aware that they did. But I had spent my adult life building a professional career, qualifying as a solicitor, raising a family and doing the innumerable unglamorous things that constitute an ordinary human existence. If somebody wanted to imagine me as a Russian spy, I could hardly prevent them. What I could not understand was why anyone who actually knew me would take such an idea seriously.

And yet I could feel that the idea was beginning to acquire a life of its own.

On 5 January 2025, I did something that seemed to me an entirely sensible response.

I applied for a job at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

I spoke several European languages, had two master's degrees under my belt, held citizenship in two EU countries, and had decades of administrative experience. I had also received specialist training from one of Russia's leading OSINT experts, who happened to be a former KGB colonel.

I possessed something NATO might reasonably have found valuable: an understanding of how its strategic adversary thought, gathered information and interpreted the world.

I was not an agent of the adversary.
I understood the adversary.
There was a difference.

Or so I thought.

There was a certain elegance to the solution, I thought. If people in the NATO world were suspicious of me, why not approach the organisation directly? They could examine my background, conduct whatever checks were necessary and decide for themselves whether I was suitable for employment. Perhaps they might even offer me a job. Brussels was an interesting city, and I was hardly opposed to an international career.

More importantly, I imagined that a formal process might resolve what informal gossip had created.

I was still operating under the rather old-fashioned assumption that institutions existed, among other things, to establish facts.

It would take me some time to reconsider that assumption.

One afternoon, during the first half of January, Laureano returned from work earlier than usual.

I heard the front door close and went out to greet him. It was one of those small domestic pleasures I had come to love: hearing him arrive, seeing his face, knowing that whatever had occupied us during the day, we were now together again.

Instead, I found him sitting on the floor in the hallway.

He had not even taken off his jacket. He was pale, his face drawn, his eyes rolling upwards in a way that frightened me. He looked so unlike himself that for a moment I wondered whether he was physically ill.

I asked what had happened.

He told me that everyone at work kept saying I was a Russian spy.

And that he was beginning to believe them.

I remember looking at him and experiencing something for which I still cannot find an entirely satisfactory description. It was not anger, although I certainly had reason to be angry. It was not even disbelief, because by then I knew that these conversations were taking place. It was the sensation of watching reality become detached from itself. I felt like Alice finally landing at the bottom of the well and having no idea where to go.

Here was a man who knew me intimately. He knew my habits, my professional life, my family circumstances, the way I thought, the way I laughed, the things that made me impatient and the things that made me happy. We had shared a home, a bed, Christmas celebrations, a journey to Kraków and the small, undignified details of ordinary life that no intelligence dossier could possibly reproduce.

And now he was sitting on our hallway floor, telling me that people at work were beginning to persuade him that I was somebody else.

I wanted to ask him what, precisely, he imagined a Russian spy would be doing in our apartment. Negotiating with the landlord about a leaking pipe? Making dinner? Complaining about the lack of hot water?

But he looked so distressed that I could not bring myself to make a joke.

I could have demanded evidence. As a solicitor, I could have cross-examined the proposition until it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. Who had made the allegation? On what basis? Was there an investigation? Had anybody actually checked anything?

Instead, I looked at the man I loved and realised that he needed something rather more immediate than legal reasoning.

"Come on," I said. "Let's go for a walk. You need some fresh air."

He got up at once, almost gratefully, and we went out.

We walked along the High Street, through the reassuringly ordinary landscape of shops, traffic and people going about their business. Nobody appeared particularly interested in international espionage. Nobody stopped us. Nobody seemed to notice that one of the pedestrians was a Spanish naval officer who had just confessed to suspecting his girlfriend of being a Russian agent.

There was something comforting about the indifference of the street.

Eventually, we stopped at a café.

Laureano went to order food. While doing so, he pushed his expensive glasses up onto his head, a perfectly ordinary gesture. Unfortunately, he pushed them a little too far. They slipped backwards and fell into the hood of his jacket, where they remained, safely concealed from their increasingly distressed owner.

A little later, he realised that he could not find them.

The glasses were very expensive, he explained, and he became extraordinarily upset. We searched the café, retraced his movements, questioned the staff and considered the possibility that somebody might have picked them up. I tried to reassure him that there was little more we could do. We could leave our contact details and hope they turned up.

But he could not let it go.

As we continued walking, he remained miserable, preoccupied by the loss. I was beginning to feel miserable myself, not because of the glasses, but because I could see how profoundly unsettled he was. The man beside me was intelligent, disciplined and professionally accustomed to dealing with difficult situations. Yet he seemed almost incapable of recovering from the disappearance of an object that, as we eventually discovered, had never been more than a few inches from his head.

The glasses were in his hood.

I cannot remember whether we laughed when we found them. I hope we did. It was the sort of ridiculous little incident that, in happier circumstances, would have become a family joke, retold for years whenever somebody misplaced their keys.

But I remember the sadness underneath it.

I had spent the afternoon trying to rescue Laureano from his own distress, and by the time we returned home I was beginning to feel as though I were drowning in it myself.

That evening, he took his son to football training.

I stayed at home, exhausted by the strange events of the day and by the growing sense that something was happening to our relationship which neither of us seemed capable of controlling.

Then my telephone lit up.

It was a message from Laureano.

He was sitting at the football ground, in exactly the same place where, some three and a half months earlier, he had first seen my photograph on Tinder. He remembered the moment our conversation began, that improbable little accident from which our entire relationship had developed.

But the message was much more than a sentimental recollection.

He wrote that he could not imagine his life without me. That he loved me. That he would fight for us, against his NATO colleagues if necessary, against the whole world. Whatever was happening, we would get through it together. To preserve out special love. Everything would be all right.

I no longer have the message, and I would not pretend to reproduce its exact wording. But I remember its substance, and above all I remember the feeling it gave me.

Relief. Deep sadness. Something very deep inside my soul knew that it was a fragile candle flame, which would not last.

For weeks I had been trying to understand the growing distance between us, the anxiety, the inexplicable references to Russian intelligence. Now, suddenly, the man I had fallen in love with was speaking to me again.

He was not simply telling me that he loved me. He was acknowledging that there was something to fight against, and promising that he would fight it with me.

Love, after all, is not particularly difficult when the world is being agreeable. The real test comes when something threatens it, when remaining together requires a choice rather than merely a feeling. And usually the threat is from inside.

And here was Laureano, making that choice.

Or so I believed.

I read his message with the desperate gratitude of someone who has been holding her breath for too long.

I wanted to believe that the nightmare was ending, that whatever had been said at work would eventually be forgotten, and that we would return to being the two people who had fallen so unexpectedly and so completely in love.

I had no idea how little time remained before he would make another choice.

The heating was still broken.

We continued negotiating with the landlord, arranging repairs and waiting for somebody to restore the elementary comforts of domestic life. Water continued to drip. The radiators remained cold. The apartment seemed determined to resist every effort to make it a home.
Meanwhile, I continued to cook dinner every day, as usual.

There is something almost offensive about the persistence of ordinary life during an emotional crisis. Whatever catastrophe may be approaching, somebody still has to buy groceries, wash dishes and decide what to eat for dinner.

That day I remember making risotto.

I cannot now recall whether I had chosen it because Laureano particularly liked it or simply because I wanted to prepare something pleasant. What I remember is the effort to make the evening ordinary, to recover the familiar intimacy of two people sitting together over a meal.

Instead, he began to talk about our future. Without each other.

At the end of the dinner, he told me that he did not want to start another relationship from the beginning. He wanted to concentrate on his children, to watch them grow up, to live a different sort of life.

I listened, trying to understand what he was saying and how it could possibly be reconciled with the message he had sent me from the football ground only days earlier.

Then he made a suggestion.

What would I think about keeping the apartment?

I did not understand the question.

Keeping it in what sense? Why would I be keeping it? Where would he be?

He explained that he wanted to move out.

I asked where he intended to go.

He wanted to live alone.

I asked what that meant for us.

And gradually, through a conversation in which I seemed to be doing most of the work of extracting meaning from his words, I understood that he wanted to end our relationship.

There was something peculiarly cruel about the indirectness of it. Not necessarily deliberately cruel; I do not know whether he was capable of expressing the decision any other way. But I remember having to ask question after question until the thing he wanted to tell me finally emerged.

He did not want to be with me anymore.

I tried to understand why.

I tried to reconcile this decision with the man who, just days before, had promised to fight his colleagues, with the man who had told me he could not imagine his life without me, with the man who had been sitting on the floor of our hallway looking as though his world had collapsed.

I could not.

So I did what I generally do when faced with a situation that appears insoluble.

I looked for a practical solution.

We had a tenancy. The apartment was large enough for two adults to live in without necessarily sharing a bedroom or a romantic life. There was no reason, I suggested, why we could not remain there temporarily as independent people while we arranged our respective futures.

We could have separate lives. We could even meet other people. I was not asking him to continue a relationship he no longer wanted. I was suggesting that we manage its ending without making everything unnecessarily complicated and expensive.

He refused.

He could not live with me under the same roof, he said, because it hurt too much to look at me.

I remember being struck by the extraordinary contradiction.

He was the one ending our relationship. He was the one proposing to leave. Yet he was telling me that the mere sight of me was unbearable.

I did not doubt that he was suffering. I had seen enough of his distress to know that something was profoundly wrong. But suffering does not automatically make a decision comprehensible, and it certainly does not explain why the person who has made it cannot tolerate a reasonable alternative.

I had questions. He had no answers. He could not explain his decision, but his decision was final.

I declined his offer to keep the flat.

He gave notice to the landlord.

And so began the peculiar final weeks of our life together, during which we continued to occupy the same address while scarcely inhabiting the same world.

Laureano became almost invisible.

He went to work in the morning and returned very late at night. I rarely saw him. Whether he was deliberately avoiding me, trying to manage his own emotions or simply unable to face the consequences of his decision, I could not tell.

I was left to organise my departure.

There is a particular humiliation in packing up a shared life while the other person remains largely absent from the process. Objects that had seemed entirely ordinary only weeks earlier suddenly acquired a terrible significance. Clothes, books, personal possessions, the little arrangements through which a temporary apartment becomes a home — all had to be separated, collected, removed.

I had not expected to be doing this.

Only weeks earlier, we had been in Kraków, trying to make a family Christmas work. Before that, there had been plans, conversations, tenderness, the exhilarating sense of having found somebody with whom I might build a different future.

Now I was arranging a removal van.

I was not merely losing a relationship. I was losing the future I had begun to inhabit in my imagination, the version of my life in which Laureano existed naturally and permanently, not as an extraordinary interruption but as part of its ordinary fabric.

And what made the loss almost impossible to process was that I still did not understand its cause.

If he had told me that he no longer loved me, I would have suffered, but I would at least have understood the words.

If he had met somebody else, there would have been a recognisable explanation.

If we had quarrelled irreparably, I could have traced the argument, examined my part in it, perhaps even learned something.

Instead, I had a man who said that people at work believed I was a Russian spy, a man who had promised to fight those people for our love, and a man who now could not bear to look at me.

I kept searching for the missing connection.

There had to be one.

I simply could not find it.

And all the while, the landlord was trying to fix the heating.

Eventually, somebody succeeded.

After weeks of dripping water, cold radiators, the absence of hot water and the endless negotiations required to persuade a rented apartment to behave like a habitable dwelling, the heating was finally repaired.

The radiators became warm.

The hot water returned.

The leak was dealt with.

A day or two later, I moved out.

Laureano was absent for most of that day as well. I organised the practicalities, gathered my belongings and prepared to leave the place in which I had so recently believed I was beginning a new chapter of my life.

He appeared in the evening, in time to help me load my things into the removal van.

I remember looking at him.

It is strange how, at moments like that, the person you know best can suddenly become almost unrecognisable. I knew his face, his voice, his gestures, the familiar physical presence of the man I loved. Yet I could no longer understand what was happening behind his eyes.

He embraced me, but distantly, as though there were now some invisible boundary between us which neither of us was permitted to cross.

He said goodbye.

And then he made a joke about the GRU colonel who was supposedly taking me back to Moscow.

Even at that moment.

Even as I was leaving.

The Russian spy had apparently become a permanent member of our relationship, although the relationship itself was now over.

I cannot say whether Laureano intended the joke to make the farewell easier, to disguise his discomfort or simply because he could think of nothing else to say.

I remember only its grotesque absurdity.

I was standing beside a removal van, watching the remains of a love affair being loaded into it, and the man I had loved was making jokes about Russian military intelligence.

I had never felt less like a spy in my life.

I felt like a woman whose heart had been broken.

And I still did not know why.

Much later, when Laureano and I were speaking again, I learned something that made the whole episode even more incomprehensible.

He had left the apartment almost immediately after me.

He told me that once I was gone, it had become unbearably empty. He could not remain there. So he moved out too, leaving the flat unoccupied while the tenancy continued.

As I later understood it, he still had approximately two months of rent to pay.

I found myself returning to the conversation in which I had suggested that we remain in the apartment temporarily as independent adults.

He had rejected the idea absolutely. He could not live under the same roof as me because it hurt too much to look at me.

Yet when I was no longer there, he could not bear to remain in the apartment without me.

I asked him why it had been necessary to end things in such a destructive way. Why we could not have managed the transition gradually, practically, without creating additional upheaval and expense.

I never received an explanation that made the events intelligible to me.

Perhaps he did not fully understand his own behaviour. Perhaps there were things he could not tell me. Perhaps the emotional contradictions were simply too painful to articulate.

I did not know then, and I would be dishonest to pretend that I know now.

But I have often thought about the cruelty of that empty apartment.

Two people who had wanted to live together had somehow reached a point where neither could live in the home they had shared. He could not bear my presence, and then he could not bear my absence. The landlord continued to receive his rent, the heating continued to work, and the rooms stood empty.

There was something almost Dickensian about it.

A house restored to perfect domestic functionality just as the human beings for whom it had been repaired disappeared.

I have often thought about Charles Dickens and Bleak House.

In his novel, the great machinery of the law continues turning while the people caught within it spend their lives waiting for answers. Proceedings generate more proceedings, questions produce more documents, and the machinery becomes so absorbed in its own operation that the human beings at its centre are gradually consumed.

At the time, of course, I was not thinking about Dickens or institutional machinery.

I was thinking about Laureano.

I was thinking about the man who had promised to fight the world for me and then, within days, had decided that he could not live with me.

I was thinking about the extraordinary ease with which the words Russian spy had entered our private life, as though a label invented somewhere outside our home could simply walk through the front door and take its place between us.

And I was thinking about the apartment.

We had returned from Kraków to find it cold. We had spent weeks trying to repair it. We had negotiated, waited, complained and persevered until the heating finally worked.

Then I left.
And so did he.

Everything that had been broken in the apartment had been repaired, except the one thing that mattered.

I had entered that home believing I was building a life with a man I loved. I left it unable to understand how something so beautiful, so improbable and so full of promise had become something so grotesquely absurd.

It was not simply heartbreak. Heartbreak, at least, belongs to a recognisable category of human experience. People fall in love, people fall out of love, relationships end. It is painful, but it is comprehensible.

What had happened to us seemed to exist outside that familiar human logic.

I could not understand how a man who knew me intimately could begin to believe that I was somebody else. I could not understand how he could promise to fight for our relationship and then abandon it. I could not understand why he appeared to be suffering so profoundly from a decision he himself had made.

And because I could not understand any of it, I could not begin to make peace with it.

I was in a terrible psychological state when I left. I felt as though I had fallen through the surface of my own life into a deep, dark pit, a place where the ordinary rules of cause and consequence no longer applied. Somewhere above me, the world continued to function. People went to work, children played football, landlords collected rent, and the heating in a recently abandoned apartment worked perfectly well.

Down at the bottom, I was trying to understand what had happened.

I thought that whatever had gone wrong, whatever absurdity had swallowed our relationship, the worst was now over. I had lost the man I loved, the home we had shared and the future I had imagined. I could not conceive of anything further that might be taken from me.

There was, in a strange way, some comfort in that thought.

At least I had reached the bottom.

So I thought.

I was wrong.

A few months later, I would hear someone knocking.

From underneath.

THE END OF PART ONE