Which betrayal was the worst? Zac lying to me? Zac trying to control everything I did? Zac’s flirtations with other women, which undoubtedly went further than I yet knew? Zac bullying anyone who he thought was obstructing him – or maybe bullying merely because he enjoyed it and could get away with it? Zac secretly filming me? My breaking into his private things would be a tiny infraction compared to the other options in that ugly game of multiple choice.

The hidden cameras, more than anything, made me see for the first time that I needed to get away from a man I’d thought I loved. They made me recognise that I barely knew him. I took stock of what he had told me.

That his birthday was November fourteenth, and he was forty-one, so sixteen years older than me. That he was an only child, and hated his parents for sending him to boarding school. That his parents lived in Vancouver, where they’d settled at the end of his father’s career in the diplomatic service, and he barely spoke to them, rarely saw them.

That he owned a house in Yorkshire which his grandparents had left him, but he wouldn’t take me there, despite my asking to go and saying how nice it would be for red squirrels to be part of what the baby knew. That he was evasive when I asked exactly where the house was, because he said he had painful memories associated with it, and asked me not to press him again on the subject.

That he basked in attention from women as if it were his birthright. That he was controlling, and sexually dangerous, two related things that I had not faced properly, telling myself that the night we conceived our baby and he held me down was an anomaly, a misunderstanding.

And that he had a missing first wife. Jane. I said her name in my head again and again. Jane. A missing woman. How could I let that go? How could I not try to help to find her, if I could, knowing what I’d learned about Zac? A man who secretly filmed me in bed with him, and probably did that to Jane too.

My head was crowding with practical questions. Was it realistic that I could simply walk out? Or smart to try? If I did, could I ever truly be rid of him? No judge would terminate his rights as a father without powerful reasons. Would he try to get custody? Maybe he would say I was unfit and unable to support a child, and that I’d been incompetent and anxious and even mentally ill since I became pregnant.

‘No,’ I said aloud.