‘I’m not going to be lectured to by a man who spends his lunchtimes fucking his secretary in hotel rooms,’ she snapped. It was a cheap shot and a well-known fact. This time the colour drained from Ralph’s face: his wife was also in finance, a more successful version of Ralph, and often joined the team for drinks.

‘I think you’d better go.’ He looked thunderous. ‘Oh. And Jules?’ he called when she was halfway out of the door. ‘You will transfer the money to the ASD charity after the auction, won’t you? HR asked me to remind you.’

‘I’m not going to dignify that with a response,’ was all she said as she stalked out of the room.

Jules returned to her desk and unlocked her computer. There was another email from Aki Mantel complaining about Alice. She groaned. She wished she’d never recommended Alice to Elliott and Aki for their nursery wing. Never agreed to be a liaison between them since Aki was super paranoid about sharing her contact details.

Out on the street, she appeared lost. She was. Ordinarily, Paul drove her into the City – it made sense rather than taking two cars – and she got a work taxi home, but when she tried to order a car now, as she had done successfully that morning, her account had been suspended.

For a few bewildered moments, she had no idea how to get to Chiswick from the City. Then she remembered: the train. Her personal card was declined when she tried to buy a ticket. Humiliated, she withdrew her joint account card from her Balenciaga purse. Paul would know when he saw it show up on their account; he would know she’d lost the money.

She returned home and it occurred to her that for the first time in decades she had nothing to do. I should eat, she thought. That’s what functional humans do. As light bathed her face from the fridge, she realised she couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought food. She ate at work, in the canteen, most days, or had takeaway delivered to her desk and charged to a client in the evenings. When did she last cook? If anyone cooked at home, it was Paul. She felt a wave of despair, picturing him at the marble-topped island, chopping vegetables and steak and listening to jazz. She looked at the contents of the fridge: eggs, some blue cheese, tomatoes. How long could she make that last for? In the cupboard she found chickpeas, spices, rice and jars and bottles of Asian ingredients she wouldn’t know what to do with. What was she going to eat? The enormity of her situation began to overwhelm her: Paul bought the food, along with doing the cooking and paying the bills. What was she going to do without him?

She opened her banking app and frowned in confusion. There was money in her account! Then she realised it was the ASD charity money, just transferred in. But she couldn’t spend that. That money was to help children like Charlotte who weren’t getting the support they needed. She’d rather starve than use that money when she’d had so many privileges in life. She transferred it into her savings, an account which once held a six-figure sum and was now empty. She couldn’t think about it for too long. She was a good person, she reminded herself, blinking back tears.