If Peter had asked me whether I wanted another child, I might even have told him the truth. Because I did. It was driving me crazy how much I wanted it. And this made me very different with Mark to the woman I had become in the dying days of my marriage to Sean. It had turned me into a sex demon, to be frank. I’d never been like that before.

And Mark wanted it, too. Not just the sex. If it had only been sex for the sake of it, it wouldn’t have been like that. There wouldn’t have been as much need in it.

We hadn’t discussed it, as such. We hadn’t needed to. Our bodies had done the talking for us, much more explicitly than we could ever have managed with words. In the first of the hotel rooms we’d shared, with daylight seeping round the edges of the curtains, we’d made love with most of our clothes still on – it had been fast and desperate, as if the other person might vanish at any moment, as if this was a chance that had to be seized.

We hadn’t used contraception. I’d told him not to worry about it, and he hadn’t. Afterwards, when I was lying in his arms, he’d said, ‘What if something happens?’

I’d said, ‘Something tells me you wouldn’t mind.’

‘You’re right,’ he’d said, nuzzling my neck. ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. It would be amazing. I can’t think of anything that would make me happier… except maybe for us to do what we just did all over again.’

And that settled it. We were in perfect agreement.

He wanted a baby, too. My baby. The baby he knew I could give him.

Four

Paula

Back in the days when I still thought of myself as happily married, I was never a particularly angry person. Or a bitter one. Live and let live, was my philosophy. I was easy-going; Mark wasn’t. I used to say (probably too often) that it was just as well I wasn’t fussy about details the way he was, that it would have been tricky for him to be married to someone who was equally particular. It was our little joke. It wasn’t especially funny, but it suggested that we were ideally suited – compatible – made for each other, and I found it comforting to repeat it.

What neither of us realised was that I was capable of a slow burn. Glacial, in fact. I guess we’re the ones you really have to watch out for: the ones who are most unpredictable when we finally blow.

All the years I was with Mark, I probably seemed like a bit of a pushover. A doormat. Not always, though. Even when I still thought myself in love with him, and imagined that we had a good marriage and a successful one, I had a mind of my own. I didn’t make all that much use of it, but it was there. And eventually, there came a time when I was ready to fight for something that I wanted.