So much of her time, that summer, was devoted to watching out for opportunities for them to be together. Charlotte was always there and, besides, Anton had a day job – some kind of financial position. He never talked about his work, and she wasn’t curious about it. That side of him didn’t interest her.

She found herself growing alert to the comings and goings upstairs. The sound of their front door closing became familiar to her, as did the noise of their car engine starting. Hilary would peer out of the window and watch Charlotte piling the children into the back seat and driving off, knowing that, minutes later, he would come calling.

Their encounters were erratic and charged. She could not be sure if, taken as a whole, it could even be termed an affair. They had made love only a handful of times, and while the sex was pleasurable, she had enough acuity to realize the pleasure was mainly derived from the sense of transgression rather than from any deep carnal connection. He was affectionate towards her in a way that seemed special – the way he stroked her hair, the way his eyes lingered over her face, taking her in. Sometimes they just talked. And she loved to listen to him. The timbre of his voice hit the perfect note in her ear. There was a lazy quality to the time he took to tell a story. He had a fondness for Greek mythology. Reading between the lines, she knew his wife had lost interest in the stories, if she’d ever had any in the first place. But Hilary loved it. She listened, enraptured.

‘Tell me again,’ she’d say to him.

And he’d stroke her arm, her head resting against his chest, the two of them sitting together on her couch, or lying in her bed, and he’d say: ‘Who will it be today?’

She always picked one of the Greek women. The blighted queens, the avenging goddesses. Hilary had no interest in the men and their battles. So she asked for Circe, Penelope, Elektra, and he would take a lock of her hair and slowly twist it around his finger, his voice reverberating in his chest, her ear against it, and she would feel herself at peace.

‘Which one am I?’ she asked him, and he thought about it for a moment and smiled.

‘Helen.’

‘Flatterer.’

Helen, possessed of such beauty it drove men to war. Hilary knew she wasn’t that.

‘You don’t see the correlation?’ he asked teasingly. ‘Helen, stolen away from her husband, Menelaus, by a man who was enraptured?’

‘Are you Paris, then, in this little Greek tragedy?’

He frowned comically, and she laughed, resting her chin against his ribcage. It was mid-afternoon. The sun was shining through the closed curtains. Greg was away at a summer school. Charlotte was shopping in town. Hilary wasn’t sure where his children were.