The hunger, pointed right.

We eat at seven. She goes up to read around half nine, and that’s when the hour I don’t talk about used to start. Door shut, sound off, an hour that became two. We hadn’t had a real conversation since spring. Not a row. A long, polite quiet. What I started to notice was the ten minutes before. It was never the screen I wanted. It was the dishwasher running and the house going still and the feeling of standing outside a lit window. The screen was the one door that always opened. Three weeks ago I went upstairs at half nine instead. I didn’t know what to say, so I said that. She put the book down. Best evening in months. I’ve kept it up. Wednesday was the first night I didn’t have to decide.

I had an app that counted days. Thirty was the record. On day thirty-one I slipped, the counter went to zero, and I sat on the kitchen floor feeling like thirty days had never happened. That was the wrong sum. A mate who’d given up smoking put it plainly: the thirty days happened, you don’t hand them back. So I binned the counter and put a calendar on the fridge. A tick for a clean day, a dot for a slip, biro, nothing clever. Dots don’t wipe ticks. The month I’m looking at has twenty-six ticks and two dots. A year ago it would have been a zero and a bad week. I’m twenty-six, I still want what everyone wants, and the tally says I’m getting a handle on it. Next month I’m going for twenty-eight.

There’s a phone in the glove box of my car. My wife doesn’t know about it. The kids don’t. I’m not going to describe what’s on it, because that makes it sound more interesting than it is. What I’ll tell you is the cost. It costs the first thirty seconds of every time I walk through my front door, because I have to check my face before I can say hello. It costs the evenings, which used to be ours and are now mine, in a car park with the engine off. I told myself for two years nobody was being hurt. Then I noticed I hadn’t been fully in a room with my wife since the phone appeared. That’s two people. I’ve told one friend it exists. It comes out of the car on Saturday. He’s coming with me.

Nothing clever. The phone charges on the landing from ten o’clock, and there’s a nine-pound alarm clock by the bed that does one thing. The first week I lay there like I’d forgotten how to be in a room with nothing in my hand. The second week I read forty pages of a book I’d owned for three years. The third week I slept, properly, the kind where the alarm is a surprise. Here’s what I noticed. The habit had never been about the thing. It was about the phone being the last door open in the house at midnight. Move the door and the pull turned down on its own, not off, down. A good month used to be four clean days. Now a bad month is four slips. The clock’s still there. So’s the book.

Twenty-nine, and the thing nobody knew was that nobody knew me. Not the habit, that’s the small part. The bigger part was that I could go a month without anyone asking a question I had to think about. I’d decided the habit was the problem and being known was a luxury for later. Wrong way round. So I told a mate, at his kitchen table, in one sentence I’d practised in the car. Not the details. Just that there was a thing, and I was getting a handle on it, and I wanted one person to know. He said, fair enough, and asked if I was still coming to five-a-side. I’ve gone every Wednesday since. Twelve blokes know my name and my week now. The habit got quieter without me looking at it.

Mine was the screen, for fifteen years, and what helped wasn’t what I expected. Not willpower. I had plenty. I could go three weeks on willpower and then lose a weekend, and every time I decided I hadn’t gritted my teeth hard enough. Wrong diagnosis. What changed was that I told one person. Not a group, not a confession, not an app. One friend, in his kitchen, in one sentence. He said, right, and put the kettle on. Nothing was different afterwards except that one person knew, and it turned out that was what I’d been reaching for the screen to avoid feeling: that nobody did. The wanting didn’t vanish. It stopped being the loudest thing in the house. Married six years now. She knows the whole story. Looked at less, known more. I wouldn’t go back.