Rule 9 dictates I must divulge everything as it occurs to me, and here it occurred to me that she was telling the truth, but she wasn’t telling me everything.

‘But?’ I fished.

‘We dug something up.’

I thought of his prison-filthy hands, as we’d shaken in front of the guesthouse. The dirt under his fingernails. The rest of him had been clean: clean shaven, dyed hair. Why hadn’t he cleaned his nails? ‘Is it in the back of the truck?’

She nodded.

‘Okay. So what is it?’ It sounded simple when I put it like that, which made me feel like it might have been true. ‘Money, I assume, to be worth that much? Something from one of the Sabres’ robberies? Jewellery? Drugs?’

‘I thought so too. I haven’t seen it.’

I laughed. It came out a hack, my vocal cords not fully defrosted. ‘All this over a treasure map?’

‘You shouldn’t laugh.’ She folded her arms. ‘I trust him.’

The word ‘trust’ hummed with double meaning. Like it could be taken out of the sentence and replaced with something else.

‘Is this because of—’

‘Don’t do this, Ern. It’s not about that.’

It wasn’t and it was. I’d never confronted her this directly before, even in marriage counselling. My anger was always stoppered by shame and grief. But if I had, we might have got past it; we might have sat down and talked it through, about what starting a family meant to each of us and what the fertility letter, which I’d opened over breakfast, had done to us. To the family we’d been trying to create.

We’d been waiting a long time for the letter. It’s strange to put such life-changing news in the post, but I suppose they considered it mundane enough to bypass a phone consult. The letter itself had been slow to come, Erin wringing her hands as she gave me each piece of bad news: the first letter had been a victim of an address mix-up that she’d had to call the clinic to fix and the second, weeks later, a soggy illegible pulp, destroyed in the rain. Erin had taken it hard. Every day she’d been first out to the letterbox in the morning, flicking through the pizza vouchers and real estate introductions as she walked up the drive, shaking her head: another day without the results.