My other hand floated to my belly. That was when I grasped that what I was feeling was not a psychosomatic response to the nervousness occasioned by my technological eavesdropping. What I was feeling was physical and real. After days of not quite being certain, there was no doubting it. I was feeling my baby kick.

A couple minutes later, the side room door smashed open, and I turned on my heel, bringing the phone to my ear as if engaged in a conversation. I looked behind me and saw Milly. Her face went bright red, and I knew that she guessed I’d been listening. I knew also that she would never give me away. But her horrified expression made me certain that whatever she and Scarlett had been saying would not be easy for me to hear.

Zac was on nights, no doubt assisted tirelessly by Joanne, whose shift began an hour before mine ended. I glimpsed her trailing after him as I left the hospital, but I still double-locked the front door. If he did somehow come home early, I wanted the extra warning of his loud curses when he realised he needed to undo the second lock.

I had thought some more about Zac’s discovery of my orange journal in its kitchen hiding place, trying to quell the mortification and force myself to examine the circumstances clearly. I’d also been replaying the way he came home to find me inspecting his old suitcases – he said he’d forgotten his phone, but I was no longer convinced. I wondered what really made him turn around and come back. The only explanation I could think of was that he somehow saw me dragging the suitcases out of the cupboard. And he saw me hiding my journal.

That is why I brought a new toy home with me, a multi-function sweeper for detecting hidden cameras that I’d stashed at work. My extremely disturbing theory was that Zac had installed some kind of surveillance system. If so, chances were that it recorded onto the cloud, so he could have infinite storage space and be able to check the footage from anywhere. He would want to be able to watch in real time or fast forward through it until he caught something interesting.

Turning the Internet router off was the best way I could think of to kill any cameras, because I certainly didn’t want him to see me sweeping the house. My heart was pumping faster as my finger approached the router’s off switch. I was crossing my fingers and toes that there wasn’t a lens trained on the router.

If there was, then I would casually mention to Zac later that the Internet had been playing up, and wonder aloud if he had had problems too. I would also say that I turned the router off for a few minutes to try to reset it and improve things.