As the clouds parted and the moon shone silver through the balcony doors, I wondered, what were my other little white lies? I knew for sure that no wife ever admitted to her husband the true number of men she’d slept with before him. When we got engaged, I’d told Harry about some of my sexual encounters during our two-year break – the ski instructor, the guitarist from that band in Byron on the schoolies weekend – but not all of them. But that’s not lying, really. It’s more a case of selective honesty. I’d also always exaggerated the size of his equipment. In my view, Freud got it wrong: it’s not women who suffer from ‘penis envy’ but blokes. ‘Is mine big? Is mine the biggest?’ How many times I’d been tempted to snap, ‘Look, I’d love to sit here all night discussing your appendage, but I’m just not into small talk.’

Clearly, the secret to a happy marriage is to keep most things, well, secret. But not an affair. That wasn’t just a lie, that was a betrayal. I would never lie about an affair. Mainly because I would never have one.

No, if Harry wasn’t going to tell me who he was screwing, then I was not going to tell him I was okay. I wanted him to sweat, the worm. Of course, I didn’t want my kids to suffer, so I answered Zoe and Jake’s texts and emojis with the news that I’d had a second opinion and was going to be fine! It was all a false alarm. If they told their dad he’d probably just think I was being brave for their sakes – which should only make him feel worse, I thought. Surely his guilt would be so strong it’d be radiating from him in zigzags visible to the naked eye. But still, nothing.

You know you’re in a bad way when you wake up with a terrible ‘morning after’ feeling and you didn’t even do anything fun the night before. Watching the sun rise over the sapphire sea, I wrote up my to-do list.

1. Stave off breakdown.
2. Divorce husband.
3. Become lesbian.
4. Have a great time bonding with your sisters.

Yes, sisters fight. Look at Jo and Amy’s rivalry in Little Women, the Queen and Princess Margaret’s power struggles in The Crown, and the one-upwomanship of those literary lionesses Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. But loyalty and love are encoded into our DNA. I would literally die for my sisters, which was ironic, because when they found out about my lie, they would literally kill me.

9

My mind was going around in circles so constantly, I felt as though my dress had been caught in a revolving door.