At least she’d prepared a beef bourguignon for the family’s evening meal before leaving for work that morning. At 5 pm she’d texted Scott to remind him to put the casserole dish in the oven at a low temperature so dinner would be gurgling away aromatically by the time she walked in the door at eight. Then it would just be a matter of steaming some greens, cleaning the kitchen, helping the kids with their homework, finding lost sports kits, putting the washing on, issuing some regulation nagging about flossing and digital detoxing, then falling into a bath before bed. She often wondered if Scott noticed that she had two jobs, chief bread winner and chief bottle washer – a role she preferred to describe as ‘domestic engineer’ or ‘president of in-home pedagogy’, but which still boiled down to being a woman who was so busy she needed to employ staff to chew her food and have friends and fun on her behalf.

When Amber pulled her car into the driveway of her lovingly restored sandstone Federation home, framed by waratahs and wattle and other native flowers, in her mind she was already in her PJs, curled up around her book. If she got to bed before Scott finished working on whatever legal opinion was currently obsessing him, she could also avoid a carnal encounter. Despite what she’d said to her sisters and the image she projected to the world, Amber often feigned sleep so that she didn’t have to have sex with her priapic husband. Amber was far too polite and husband-pleasing to ever rebuff his advances. It wasn’t non-consensual, but nor was it sensual.

But if she couldn’t sidestep Scott’s advances, her plan B was to bring up every detumescing subject she could think of, from global warming to shower grouting to Korean nuclear proliferation, in the hope of deterring his ballistic missile. Maybe she could just wear her designer trousers to bed? The snug fit could prove to be an excellent contraceptive – once she got into them, they were nearly impossible to get off again. But, in fact, her family were about to provide the straw that would break the woman with the camel-toe’s back.

Amber could smell the fire the moment her key hit the lock. Skeins of thick, pungent smoke lay in the air. Groping her way by braille to the kitchen, she found the grill shooting flames and the casserole sitting, uncooked, in the oven. Scott had clearly turned on the grill by mistake before retreating back to his man cave at the bottom of the garden.

When she stormed into the converted boat shed to confront her husband, he replied, nonchalantly, ‘Sorry. Thought I’d turned the right knob. They all look so alike.’

Amber stared at her husband in astonishment. ‘You mean we’ve been married for twenty-five years and you don’t know how to switch on our oven?’

He shrugged. He shrugged!