I left my husband by accident.

Not left as in 'left at home, whilst I run out to do some errands' but left as in 'if I ever again have to pretend not to notice whilst you pretend not to be picking your teeth with a pen, I will not be responsible for my actions and therefore I am deserting you before anything horrendous happens.'

I hadn't planned to go.

For goodness sakes, I had just spent three days planting bulbs for next spring. I had drawers full of half-finished needlepoint projects. Well someone else could enjoy them. I would like to say that I spent hours explaining my decisions to Toby, my husband of fifteen years. God knows that he deserved some kind of explanation. But I didn't. I packed a bag containing a random collection of underwear, my favourite ball dress, books and my teddy. No coat, no winter clothes. With hindsight, I could have been more organized but I just wanted to go.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with Toby. He was a decent man. The kind of person who is always referred to as 'a good bloke.' He went to work, came home, picked his teeth, went to bed. I was so bored that I spent hours contemplating life as a widow. I would be suitably depressed for a decent interval before morphing into a devastating and dangerously attractive man-magnet. Every now and again I caught myself half way through this fantasy and was disgusted at myself. Wishing the poor man an early death? Who knew that indifference could be as corrosive as hatred?

And so I left. I walked out one day in the violet hour between getting home from work but before the tedium of the evening set in. I took my bag and went. And there my plan fell apart. Standing on the corner of the street, I didn't have a clue where to go. A taxi went past. I got in it and thus ended up at the airport Hilton. Why there? I suppose that all those years of watching glamorous people get into cars and say 'take me to the Hilton' must have left a mark on me. I didn't recall any of them being a hollow shell of a soon-to-be divorcee who would sit on a Hilton bed and contemplate the wall for three days. That vignette wouldn't have been quite as enticing to the upwardly mobile traveller.

I sat. I thought. Sometimes I paced the room for a bit of variety. Finally, I wrote a letter to Toby. Terribly old-fashioned but letters have the fabulous benefit of the recipient being unable to answer back immediately. Toby was a solid man. Somewhere, there was a solid woman who would value him. I was not that woman. The problem was, he wasn't Edward.

Edward had been, was, the love of my life. I had worshipped the ground he walked on. He was devastatingly handsome with a strong, mobile face and sparking green eyes that seemed always to be contemplating his next adventure. Fiercely intelligent, he had the unfair genetic benefit of perfect co-ordination which he put to dazzling effect on the polo field. Miraculously, for almost two years he had been mine. And then, one day, he wasn't.

I hadn't noticed the changes. Actually, even with hindsight I couldn't pinpoint when he stopped loving me. We were up in Scotland for the New Year and I was shivering behind him as he picked off pheasants with his father's gun.

"I saw you dancing last night" he said (BANG) "you looked so happy' (BANG) "I can never make you that happy" (BANG) "We need to break up." Bang…

In a minute, I lost Edward. The pheasants were better off. At least their suffering was short.

Even at this distance, I didn't know why he had left me. Had I changed? Possibly. I spent far too much time pretending to be a wife. I washed his shirts (badly) and ironed his clothes (the burn marks provided a topic of conversation for weeks). On the plus side, I could cook. And I did. Dinner parties, drinks parties, picnics… I was a one-woman catering company. My flat heaved with gently rotting bottled fruit. I hated peaches in syrup, yet had spent a whole weekend canning the wretched things after Edward waxed lyrical about peach pie. Apparently it was a 'Southern Thing'. Oh yes. I hadn't mentioned that. He was from Louisiana. Not New Orleans but deepest, darkest country Louisiana. He had an accent which made me go weak at the knees and an incredible lust for life. His equal devotion to God, women and killing things made the London boys look like the milksops they were. A perfect man in my eyes…

Worst of all, when I lost Edward, I lost his friends. They had all come over to London together. Jasper whose insouciance made life seem like a smooth river of joy. I hadn't realised that this was part of his act, his way of coping until I caught him one evening with a look of such inexpressible misery on his face that I wanted to wrap him up and save him from the world. Emmet was the opposite, shallow as a summer pool and just as wonderful to be around. Always full of plans and schemes which would invariably end badly, he was a force of nature. There were always girls, 'the group', but no one permanent. I am ashamed to say that I gloried in being the Girlfriend as opposed to the companion of the moment. Hubris. Serves me right.

I became a shell of myself. I ran over reasons why Edward had gone. Was I too loud? Too opinionated? I shrank into silence. Not successful or shiny like the parade of girls through the flat? I threw myself into my career. I found to my surprise that I was good at selling and ended up in the City. And there I met Toby, who was kind to me. It should have been enough but it wasn't.

And now here I was, alone in the Hilton. Time to think.

I had surreptitiously tracked Edward for years. I knew that he had moved back to Louisiana. I saw his picture in the Times Picayune, always 'sharing a joke' with a devastating brunette, or blonde, or red-head. Jasper popped up too, as did Emmett. So they had all gone home. Gazing out at the thin grey rain streaming down the double glazing of the window, I couldn't say I blamed them.

I had to face it, I had never moved on. I had accepted Toby because I had given up. I wasn't good enough for the person I wanted so I had accepted second best. I had always felt that I was a failure. A hundred self-help books told me that it wasn't so and yet, deep within me, I knew that it was true. I needed to know what was wrong with me and then maybe I could work out what to do next.

And that is why, on a rainy afternoon in the Heathrow Hilton, I decided to either close the chapter or rewrite it. I was going to Louisiana.