Paul had forgiven her before. He’d forgive her again, surely? This time she wasn’t asking him for anything. This time she’d fix it herself and they had the IVF coming up and hopefully, hopefully, they could move on from all this.

The first time was awful. Paul and Jules had separate bank accounts, which their salaries went into, and a joint account they each put a set amount in to cover their bills and expenses. Once Jules had maxed out her own account, she began dipping into the joint account. At first Paul hadn’t noticed the small amounts disappearing from the joint account, but £500, withdrawn to cover her stake in a poker game she’d lost, drew his attention. ‘New shoes,’ she smiled. ‘Sorry, I must have used the joint account card by mistake. I’ll transfer it over.’ That’s when she started using credit and it was amazing, with her salary, how many cards she was allowed to take out, how many accounts she could open with gambling companies. Once she maxed out one, she simply opened another. And another. But then her bank cards started being declined. Warnings, sent by credit card companies because there were insufficient funds for her direct debits, arrived. Paul picked one up from the mat once, frowned at the bright red ‘WARNING! ACTION REQUIRED!’ on the envelope. Jules took it casually. ‘Junk mail,’ she shrugged, and then she changed all her statements to online. It didn’t feel like lying. She couldn’t explain why. It felt like she was protecting herself. This was her way of coping with the relentlessness of her losses, emotional rather than financial. And already then, after two rounds of IVF and two miscarriages, the impact of the financial loss paled into insignificance compared to the emotional loss. The horror of knowing there was a baby growing in your body and then, suddenly, not. Her thinking became disjointed. She moved from moment to moment, finding different ways to cope. To keep going into the office, and pretending she was the same. Julia Frey-Jackson, on the fast-track programme to becoming a director, with no interest in starting a family any time soon. She was discovered, quite horrifyingly, when two bailiffs turned up at the house and tried to seize her car.

‘Julia?’ Paul had called frantically from outside. ‘There’s two guys here and they say you owe a lot of money. There must be some mistake?’ But she could hear the uncertainty in his voice as she came downstairs, pale, shaking, and she could almost hear him thinking: oh right, as he pieced things together: her failure to put petrol in the car for weeks on end, how she pretended to forget his birthday last month but the following week lavished him with gifts. She’d never seen a look in his eyes like that before. And she couldn’t bear to see it again.

He’d paid off her debts that first time. It was £200,000, draining his own savings, an act of love, protecting her from something he couldn’t begin to understand. Unwittingly, he’d given her a clean sheet, to begin again. She hadn’t intended to. She really hadn’t. She made it through another round of IVF, another miscarriage, but the fourth proved too painful, the ‘free’ deposits the online casinos were offering her – even though she’d closed her accounts – too difficult to resist. One had given her £10,000. Available with a single click to reactivate her account. With the stress of work and the IVF and their relationship – the way he’d begun regarding her, looking at her differently – she did. She clicked. It happened again. She became used to the feeling of shame flooding through her. Waited for it, welcomed it. Anything to mask the pain of her true loss. The one that couldn’t be won back. Why do you do it? he’d asked her the first time, and she couldn’t translate her feelings into words.