People accuse marriages of losing their spark. Like they have a supernatural zap of energy that can be mishandled, misplaced. And perhaps the case could be made that if my wife was able to cultivate a relationship with my convicted brother exclusively by phone and email (because he didn’t have visitors) without me noticing, our marriage was already over. And don’t allow me to paint her as the bad guy here, because she isn’t and it was – over, that is. The night Michael visited, body in the back of his car, we were already in separate rooms. Otherwise she might have seen the money when I threw it on my bed. But it wasn’t the spark that was the problem. It was the lighter, the flint, the matches. And they weren’t lost, they were taken. It wasn’t that we lost our spark, it was that we didn’t have the tools to make it anymore.

‘I don’t want it to be weird,’ she’d murmured at that breakfast. She’d been spinning her wedding ring on her finger as she said it. Which I took less as a metaphor for an imploding marriage than a realisation of how much weight she’d lost. A person’s cheeks or hips give a window into short-term ups and downs, but when you see it in their hands . . . I had known we were both thinning out, but I used to have to pull that ring off her like I was starting a chainsaw. Seeing it so loose made me think about what I was doing to her. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing cruel between us: no screaming matches or thrown plates. But we’d reached the point where, in even being together, we were doing something to each other. Maybe if she hadn’t been spinning it I would have said something different, but she was and so I didn’t.

‘You can do whatever you want,’ I said.

She gave me one of those smiles where your eyes glisten in a way that means you’re not really smiling, and told me not to tell Lucy yet.