I didn’t mean to steal his wallet. I’m not a thief. It was all a mistake.

I was feeling guilty enough before I even saw it.

On my last night of freedom, I was sitting alone in a pub, doing the best I could to drown my sorrows and my guilt. I had a half drunk glass of Merlot in front of me and I intended to make the rest of the glass last as long as possible. Once it was gone, I would have to go home and I was in no rush to do that.

I had been to the bank to try and explain to them that I couldn’t just conjure up the mortgage arrears out of thin air. The woman behind the desk politely nodded, agreeing with me that the text messages and letters weren’t helping. She promised they’d put them on hold for a month, give me chance to get the money from somewhere.

I’d asked for a loan and she’d managed not to laugh but that was as positive as the conversation got. It didn’t take long to establish she wasn’t going to do anything to help. The first message hit my phone before I was even out the door.

URGENT - Zoey Greene - You must call us at once to discuss a matter of extreme importance.

I ignored it. I also ignored the next five that came as I walked home.

The sixth message came just as I was walking past the pub and without even looking at my phone, I turned and headed inside. I needed a drink. Badly.

It was a posh place, not somewhere I’d ever been in before. I did not fit in. The men were all in suits, even the bartender. The women were in dresses so tight and short, they might as well have been naked. Some of them practically were.

I approached the bar and dug out my last ten pounds in the world. If you’re going down, what does it matter if you burn your last tenner?

“A glass of your cheapest red,” I said, ignoring the look the bartender gave me.

I got a penny change with my glass and as I carried the drink and my last coin to a table by the window, my phone buzzed yet again.

I rolled my eyes as I dug it out but this time it was my mother.

How did you get on at the bank?

I didn’t reply. What was I supposed to say? This time next month, the entire family will be out on the streets. I had to raise five thousand pounds just to cover the arrears on the mortgage and the chances of that happening were as high as me finding a winning lottery ticket stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

Let her hold onto her hope for a little while longer. She thought I’d somehow be able to stop the repossession process if I just said the right things to the bank. The optimism of parents. “You’re so much better with this sort of thing,” she’d said with a smile. “You’re my little star.”

Her little star was jobless, living with her parents and grandparents like Charlie Bucket and soon to be homeless. Worst of all, there was no chocolate factory manager to solve all my problems. There was just me and I had let them all down. I had failed to keep my family safe.

While I was working, it was all okay. Tough but okay. It was only packing boxes on a conveyor belt in a factory but it was work. Then I was made redundant and the same fate hit my father two weeks later. We have lots of luck in my family, all of it bad.

My mother wanted to work but her hip had been failing for years, the result of trying to care for her own parents in a house that was too small for the number of people in it. She did her best but whichever way you looked at it, we were screwed.

My boyfriend left me when I lost my job, happily telling me he’d been sleeping around for the entire time we’d been together. I had done everything for him, never raised my voice, never asked for anything, and yet it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t good enough for him. If I didn’t have money, I wasn’t worth being around.

So I had a glass of wine to drown it out for a few short minutes. It was expensive and I couldn’t afford it but I had it anyway.

I was sipping slowly at it when I saw the wallet.

The entire time I’d been sat there, opposite me there had been a man and a woman. She’d been laughing the laugh of the rich and carefree, he’d been talking in a lower voice, his muscular body crammed into a suit that looked like it cost more than my house.

She was stunningly beautiful, like she’d walked straight off a film set into here, long shining blonde hair, full of life, perfect make up, dangling gaudy earrings that screamed money. It was somehow worse that she was no older than me. She was twenty, maybe twenty-one at most.

He was older, in his thirties at least. Short, neat hair, no grey that I could see. Prominent brow, strong chin, hint of stubble that he probably slapped thousands of pounds of moisturiser on to keep it looking like that. I couldn’t see his eyes properly but I bet they were lit up, staring at her ample chest as she tossed her hair and thrust it towards him, her hand sliding over the table to touch his. I felt a flare of jealousy without knowing why.

I found myself watching them interact, feeling a bubbling rage of jealousy, combined with despair, bitterness, and sorrow all rolled into one noxious bundle. They didn’t know what it was like to be me. They had no idea what it was like being poor, having to struggle to survive. People like that would never know.

I had to force myself to look away from them, feeling a tear forming in my eye. When I looked up again, they had parted. She was heading out of one door and he’d gone out of another.

That was when I saw the wallet. I didn’t think of stealing it straight away. I was sure he’d come back for it, realise his mistake.

But he didn’t.

By the time I’d emptied my glass, he still hadn’t returned. It was still there, half hidden by the cushion on his chair. It must have fallen out of his pocket. The bartender hadn’t noticed it when he collected their glasses. Only I had.

The emotions inside me coalesced into anger. Anger at him for flaunting his wealth, at her for having such an easy life when mine was such a relentless effort just to stay afloat.

I didn’t want to spend their money. I only wanted to make their lives difficult, just for a few minutes. Give them a hint of the problems other people had.

So I stood up and walked past his seat, leaning down and grabbing the wallet in a single fluid motion, ready to drop it as soon as anyone said anything.

No one did. They were all too wrapped up in their own worlds. With the wallet safely tucked inside my jacket, I pushed open the door and headed outside.