I laughed out loud. “Oh. Right. OK, then. So all those endless bloody fights about work and me not being around enough, those were what, a diversion? Just to keep me guessing?”

“You know that’s not what I said. And you know perfectly well that I had every reason to be sick to death of never being sure whether ‘See you at eight’ meant tonight or next Tuesday, or of asking you what you did today and being told ‘Work,’ or—”

“All I know is that I should’ve got it written into the settlement that I never needed to have this conversation again. And what Rose Daly has to do with anything—”

Olivia was keeping her voice even, but the undercurrent was powerful enough that it could have thrown me off my bar stool. “She had plenty to do with it. I always knew all the rest of it was tied up with the fact that I wasn’t this other woman, whoever she was. If she had rung you at three in the morning to see why you weren’t home, you would have picked up the bloody phone. Or, more likely, you would have been home to begin with.”

“If Rosie had rung me at three in the morning, I’d have made millions from my hotline to the afterlife and moved to Barbados.”

“You know exactly what I mean. You would never, ever have treated her the way you treated me. Sometimes, Frank, sometimes it felt like you were shutting me out specifically to punish me for whatever she had done, or just for not being her. Trying to make me leave you, so that when she came back, she wouldn’t find someone else in her place. That’s what it felt like.”

I said, “I’m going to try this one more time: you dumped me because you wanted to. I’m not saying it came as a huge surprise, and I’m not even saying I didn’t deserve it. But I am saying that Rose Daly, especially given the fact that you didn’t know she had ever existed, had sweet fuck-all to do with it.”

“Yes she did, Frank. Yes she did. You went into our marriage taking it for granted, beyond any doubt, that it wasn’t going to last. It took me a long time to realize that. But once I worked it out, there didn’t seem to be much point any more.”

She looked so lovely, and so tired. Her skin was starting to turn worn and fragile, and the sickly kitchen light picked out crow’s-feet around her eyes. I thought of Rosie, round and firm and bloomed like ripe peaches, and how she never got the chance to be any other kind of lovely except perfect. I hoped Dermot realized just how beautiful Olivia’s wrinkles were.