Luckily, I am able to leave the office at a reasonable time for a Monday afternoon, but the drive to the cottage still takes over two hours with the traffic. I am seething and irritable, constantly cutting up other drivers and swearing when others do the same to me, my mood getting worse and worse. I play the scene where I will confront her in my head a hundred times and each time she is more infuriating, more smug, more of a bitch, until she is a parody even of herself. I finally pull off the main road and find the small National Trust car park. I will leave my car here and walk the rest of the way, give myself a chance to calm down a little before I confront her.

I told Chris that I was staying up in London tonight, so he won’t be expecting me home. We agreed when we got married that we wouldn’t be “one of those couples,” couples who feel they have to check in constantly and always need to know where the other one is. We make sure to let each other know if we won’t be home for dinner and check in if we get held up. Plus we make sure to have a “date night” every other Friday. It works. Particularly as we both travel a lot for work, although I spend a fortune on a data plan to be able to FaceTime regularly. The one time Chris couldn’t make it—his colleague was having major surgery and he had to cover for him at a conference—he apologized so profusely I thought he might give himself an aneurysm. We were so smug about it all, especially in our first year as Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle.

But there was always a little part of me that wondered if I gave him too much opportunity to cheat on me. That I was too laissez-faire about the nights he spent alone in soulless hotels with little to do but drink too much on expenses. I have never cheated on him. Despite the number of times I’ve had the offer of a little “comfort” or “distraction,” or whatever other buzzword someone could think of. The only time I had ever even considered it—considered only, I never acted on it—was with a guy who just laid it out in black and white.

“Come to my room, we’ll order room service, drink the minibar and do the deed.” His accent was similar to mine.

“I’m guessing you’re also thirty-two?” I had asked him. We had been in the same year at school—although in different Wiltshire towns—using the same oblique word to hide our activities from our parents. He had nodded and laughed. “Would it help if I offered to…” He made the motion we had used for oral sex.

I’d turned him down, but we’d sat at the bar for a while, reminiscing about school and the toys we had as kids, the films we watched, the music that had been our shared soundtrack to adolescence. Perhaps I shouldn’t have turned him down. Maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then I wouldn’t be walking to the cottage to confront my sister about how she’s been fucking my husband.