It pulled the rug right out from under me. You were so together. So grown-up. How could you possibly have let this happen?

But as I looked at the payments in and out, I started to have some idea. The clothes you wear so well are all designer, aren’t they? And those company nights out where you lavish free drinks on everyone are costing you thousands per year. And then there’s your car, which I right then discovered wasn’t ‘a really good deal’. I know now that it costs you nine hundred a month. It costs a mortgage, Niall. A mortgage. And I find it incomprehensible that a week ago you mentioned swapping it for a newer model when you are so deep in debt that it’s terrifying.

The money coming in was almost as worrying. It was clear that you were taking out loans. The sums were too big and too round to be anything else. And I know what those kinds of loans cost in interest.

The more I saw, the more I started to doubt everything you’d ever told me. More than anything, I doubted that you actually liked yourself. How could anyone who felt comfortable in their skin be so desperate to have so many symbols of status? Because there was status written all over every single payment you’d made.

I went pretty quickly from being frightened of those numbers to being searingly angry. Four nights ago, you’d held up my erratic behaviour as a sign of inadequacy. As definitive proof that I couldn’t cope with having a child. And while you were punishing me for that, you were busy being as irresponsible as it was possible to be.

I know you’ll wonder why I said nothing. I could so easily have confronted you.

But as I sat there with that statement in front of me, and I thought about having an open conversation, I felt everything in me protest. I wasn’t strong enough. Not just then. And part of me worried that you would react defensively, and tell me off for snooping. I don’t know even now if that was unfair of me.

So I took that statement, envelope and all, and I hid it in a copy of Handel’s Messiah, which I slid back onto the shelf in my music room. It was somewhere you would never look. We were three months married, and you had already lost interest in my music. It had become, if anything, an irritation to you when I played. I’m pretty sure it was before this that you first came and shut the music-room door while I was practising, so you could continue your evening uninterrupted.