Friday March 23

It has been 3 days since I trekked all the way out there to Kumeu to find Bonnie huddled in a mindless heap, squirting gallons of rescue remedy down her throat, trying to ignore the fact that she’d torched a perfectly saleable piece of real estate. It really felt like going back into the dark ages, horse and plow, mud, depression. Well that was clearly the state Bonnie was in, gasping for air and incapable of assembling a coherent thought to save her silly self. And when I made it clear that I knew what she’d been up to, down she went like a sack of spuds. Passed out, on the nasty lino of her 80’s kitchen right in front of the fridge.

Next development? One Francesca Hoyle marches in to my office with no hallos and starts barking on about the bank needing a clear plan to salvage my finances. Hallo? It's not that easy. Not when you have a clear case of arson – as the insurance company is now claiming – and fire investigations which are likely to take a month! And Ms Hoyle wanting me to come up with the money in 24 hours?? What planet was she from?

If I think about it now, I was so thrown by her demands, and by the shock of the fire, that I barely knew what I was doing. I drove back to Ponsonby with the idea that Stuart would do what he usually did in times of crisis – that he would help. I found him gardening. He didn’t pay the slightest attention to anything I said. I pleaded with him to talk to Spencer and to find work again – work that the hospital desperately wants to give him – work that any cosmetic surgery was screaming out to pay him for – but he spat my words back in my face, mocking me!

And what followed next I will never forget for the rest of my life. I attacked my husband. I hit him, I took off my shoe and I thumped him with it. I chased him in to his garden shed and screamed and said the most awful things I could think of. Julian appeared out of nowhere and witnessed my unhinged tirade. There was Stuart cowering with blood running down his face from the whack I’d just given him, while I stood there screaming blue murder.

Oh, my, god. In a condition I can only now call narcolepsy I returned to the office and wept. For all we used to be and for all that we had come to. A shattered family which barely held together. At that moment my boss John Ackroyd approached me offering tenderness. Again, in my stunned state, I found myself desperate responding to his caresses. One thing led to another… I’m so embarrassed by it all. And I blame Bonnie for bringing me this low.

Everything passed in a blur. John offered the money to save my relationship with the bank. It was a devil’s bargain but I made it. He stared at me with those adoring eyes of his, which normally made me gag, but this time I gazed back with one of those happy stoned expressions Julian wears when he gets home from a teenage party.

Then Jase attacked me in the carpark, attempted to intimidate me. I told him to back off, warning him and his dimwit wife that the cops would be the next to visit.

Then I got home to… Caroline, a vision from the past – and not the happy past either…. My betrayer, my bridesmaid, Caroline, standing there looking like a refugee from the third world, or a Hare Krishna convert, swathed in pinks and beige silks, looking like she was dying…

Well she was. She is. She has weeks to live. She’s as thin as a rake and living on herbal tea and air.

She saw right through me. I was so unnerved. For all my sophistication, and all the techniques to cover up, to distract, well, all that amounted to diddly squat… Caroline took me back to who we used to be… and who we’ve left behind. The moment I clapped eyes on her I resented the intrusion, but in fact she was a godsend. Just having the evening together with her, I remembered all sorts of things we used to do, the laughs, the nonsense.

She sent me off to work in the morning with no long goodbyes. I can see the wisdom in that too. She said Love your family. That’s the thought I have to hold on to. Love them as they fall apart… Caroline was off to Mexico to a drug clinic for cancer and I would never see this woman again in my life but her intervention was surely heavensent.

I got to my office to discover John was hiding from me… he knew completely well that I had 24 hours to fix up the mortgages. That period was about to expire when she rang. Francesca Hoyle, financial harpy. And in one vicious swoop, she threw my case study into the paper-shredder. Might as well have. The property I’d struggled so hard to put my name to, my investment for my sons, the house next door, Arthur’s house, was now back on the market and there was nothing I could do to stop that.