Besides, there was the money to consider: how much longer could she pretend to be bringing in a salary each month? On paper, she thought, the options were straightforward: stay or leave. People had affairs all the time, and they either left their partners or stayed. You either did the right thing, or you didn’t. And there could hardly be any doubt about what the right thing to do would be. If she chose Ivan, she would have to tell him about her children. It would destroy everyone. The possibility made her feel physically sick. No, the only reasonable choice would be to stay with Tom, to save Sadie and Callum from the inevitable fallout if she left.

And yet on the days she spent apart from Ivan, she yearned for him; not just for her proximity to him but also for the escape that his existence – their life together – had come to represent. It was this respite from her other reality that enabled her to miss the children sufficiently in their absence that when she returned to them, she was able to be the mother they needed.

That was how she justified her life with him, when she looked back later, once it was too late: a life separate to, but not necessarily at odds with, her life with Tom. The word affair suggested some kind of hierarchy, but she could not think of her relationship with either man as more or less important. Both served a crucial, and complementary, purpose; so much so that it was impossible to think that she could survive one strand of her life without the other.

At home, she and Tom had settled not so much into a loveless arrangement as one devoid of touch. How could she let him close enough that she might give herself away?

‘Shit! I didn’t realise it was so late …’ Tom’s voice pulled her back into the present: the Christmas tree, the same songs that played year after year.

‘What time is it?’ she asked, disorientated as if she’d been awoken from a deep sleep.

‘Six thirty,’ Tom said. ‘Sadie will be out of the film in a minute.’

‘I’ll go,’ she replied, too loudly, desperate for an excuse to escape the confines of the house which seemed to grow smaller, more claustrophobic, by the day.

‘Really? Should you be driving—’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, collecting her keys from the table and walking towards the hallway. ‘I’ve only had a couple of glasses. It’s Camden Town, it will only take me a few minutes.’

‘I don’t mind going,’ he said, and she snapped at him.

‘Tom, I said I’m doing it, she is my daughter as well. I’m not completely incompetent.’

‘Fine,’ he raised his hands as if she was pointing a gun at him. ‘I’ll put some food on. Callum, you can help me.’