‘Rachel, you’re being completely impractical,’ he said. ‘I can’t take them to Belfast. I’ve work to do. I’ll be out at the office and who’ll mind Molly? I’m pretty sure you’re not planning on running out on work and coming with us?’

‘You know I can’t. Not with exams coming up. My pupils are relying on me to get them through. Maybe I could travel up and down every evening … I don’t know. Let me think about it.’

‘So you’re putting your kids at school ahead of our children? You know it’ll unsettle them and Molly wouldn’t even see you. She’d be sleeping when you left and back in bed by the time you reached Belfast. But yeah, tell yourself it’s in the best interests of the children if you need to,’ he said, rolling his eyes.

‘That’s not it at all. I just want them to be safe.’

I was shouting then, crying. I couldn’t understand why he was making it so difficult, except to think that he really didn’t care about us. He liked his alone time. He didn’t need the girls cramping his style. The scratches – and they were unmistakably scratches – didn’t get there on their own. Had he someone he was aching to see in Belfast? Was this murder just a massive inconvenience to his extra-curricular love life?

I knew I was a hypocrite. I’d lost the right to be suspicious and angry the first day I’d agreed to go for coffee with Michael after class. Or the day I’d stored his name as ‘Michelle’ in my phone. If I’d been planning to keep things platonic, if it was no threat to our marriage, then why would I have done that? Maybe it was my fault Paul had been seeing someone else. My fault that he was angry and hard to reach. Had I pushed him away as I’d pulled Michael closer? Was it my coldness that made him talk to me as if my very existence annoyed him? The scratches on his arm, the angry pointing of the knife, the laughing away of my genuine concerns.

‘Please,’ I asked him. ‘Just think about it.’

‘I have thought about it and no. There has to be a better solution.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Rachel

Evening arrived and we sat together in the living room, but even though we were in the same space we might as well have been miles apart.

I looked to where Paul sat. He’d been glued to his iPhone for the last half-hour. We’d barely spoken since our argument earlier. There’d been no discussion on further options. He’d even left the room when the police arrived to pick up the flowers. Molly had looked on open-mouthed from the top of the stairs as the two uniformed officers came into our house.