As soon as I come in the front door I have a heavy heart. Not the everyday type of heaviness – this is worse, far worse. I am dead inside. Once you make a threat there is no going back, I am now faced with a real possibility that she might leave me. I’ll have to let her go out for this drink with Jerome.

My breath is straining a bit because the place is in such a fucking mess but I know that I cannot say anything after the incident the night before. The pale blue tiles behind the stove are splattered with grease and I think about scouring them with a wire brush. Jenny is preparing dinner, she has flung a whole load of ingredients on to the counter. There’s a bag of red onions, a blue plastic box of mushrooms, wrapped neatly in cellophane, there’s an assortment of peppers. It’s as if she has come in and emptied out the entire contents of the bottom drawer in the fridge. I think about warning her about how to cook steak. She has a habit of completely destroying good meat.

I ask her why she is wearing her coat. She tells me that she took her walk and hasn’t had the time to take it off. I’m not one bit happy that she left the children on the green playing, essentially unsupervised, while she was out walking but I figure that this is a battle that I am surely going to lose. Jenny sees absolutely nothing wrong with leaving them by themselves for short pockets of time. She thinks that it is vital to their personal development. I strongly disagree with her thesis as I see danger in every crevice of a footpath, every stranger that walks by the green – a potential kidnapper. Over-heightened fears are one thing but Jenny not being completely straight with me is another thing entirely. I ask her why she couldn’t wait for me to come back from work this evening before taking her walk. She is fully aware that I don’t enjoy my job, and that I am highly unlikely to spend extra time there unnecessarily and that she ought to know that I’d be on my way. I don’t wait for her to answer my question before I ask her where she walked.