It might have been easier to cope with if she understood, but she didn’t understand. She’d thought she and Richard were happy, and the fact that he’d been unhappy enough to have an affair and leave and she hadn’t even known he’d felt that way left her with an even greater sense of failure.

He’d loved her once, she was sure of that. You’re everything to me, Milly. You’re exactly what I need.

Richard was twelve years older than her, which at times had felt like a lot, and at other times like nothing at all. She’d met him when she was twenty-one, and he’d seemed so sophisticated compared to all the men of her own age whose idea of dressing for a date was to pull on a clean-ish T-shirt.

Richard worked in pharmaceutical sales and had just had a promotion. He wore suits and drove an expensive car that smelled of leather. He took her to dinner and sent her flowers. He made her feel safe.

Right from the beginning their relationship had been comfortable and easy and right. They weren’t just lovers, they were friends. Good friends. He’d taken her for weekends away and proposed to her under the Eiffel Tower on a trip to Paris. For their honeymoon he’d whisked her off to Greece. They’d swum under a sky so blue it dazzled, in a sea so clear you could see right down to the bottom where shells nested in the sand. At night, her skin warmed by the sun, she’d worn strappy sundresses and sat across from him feeling beautiful and loved as they’d dined on plates of creamy tzatziki while watching the sun go down over the Aegean. The setting had been perfect, but they’d agreed that they didn’t need a Greek beach or gourmet food to be happy. Their surroundings didn’t matter. All that mattered was each other. In this crowded world, this massive sea of people who inhabited the planet, somehow they’d managed to find each other, and it felt like a miracle.

And it was true that their marriage hadn’t been perfect every day, but whose was? Richard had been away for work so often that she frequently felt like a single mother. He never seemed to be available for the boring bits of parenthood, like doctor appointments or visits to the orthodontist, but she was mostly fine with that because her job was more flexible than his, and anyway she adored being with their daughter. There were times when Richard annoyed her, and she was sure she annoyed him, but that was part of marriage, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just showing up for the candlelit dinners and laughs, it was weathering the tough stuff. The parts that weren’t dreamy.