A lie.

I felt dizzy, disoriented, like I’d suddenly started walking up a down escalator.

A lie. Why did she lie?

Why do people usually lie?

She was trying to protect me from something, or protect William, or both of us.

Do you really believe that?

No. Do you believe the alternative?

No, definitely no.

I didn’t know what to believe. Because what was the alternative?

Ben.

I married Mel knowing that she was independent, and I respected that, liked it about her, liked the fact that she wanted her own time, her own hobbies and friends. The same way that she respected me, and knew that I was different to most of her friends’ husbands in that I loved being home with William, loved spending time with the little guy. I had never regretted going down to three days a week for a couple of years after he was born, so I could be there for him more before he went to school. Mel had gone back to work full-time after four months’ maternity leave but that was her choice and I totally understood it. She brought in more than my teacher’s salary anyway, she liked her job and she was bloody good at it. We fit together perfectly, like interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

We didn’t lie to each other.

But now it felt like everything familiar was sliding away out of reach. Twelve years we had been together, nine of them married.

She was there with him, and she had lied about it.

Thinking about Ben again brought me up short. I’d been so focused on Mel and William that I had not thought about him. I had to talk to him, ask him, find out what he had to say before I broached it with Mel again.

Assuming he was OK.

You left him there. Bleeding.

‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ William’s head emerged from the towel.

‘Nothing, big man.’

‘You look sad.’

‘Not sad, Wills, just a bit tired.’

He yawned, his half-dry hair sticking up in every direction.

‘I’m not tired.’

‘You are a little bit, aren’t you? Do you want a strawberry milk before your story?’

‘Yes!’ He began bouncing on the spot. ‘Milkshakemilkshake!’

He drank it sitting at the kitchen table with his Cars colouring book and felt-tip pens. Next I mixed up a strong Bloody Mary for Mel – she always had one on a Thursday, gin and tonic on a Friday – the routine of hundreds of nights. While my hands worked, my mind kept returning to it. Over and over.

A meeting. A fight. A lie.

Mel appeared in the kitchen, towel in one hand, iPhone in the other. I handed her the Bloody Mary, kissed her on the cheek.

‘Have you seen my phone? I think I’ve lost it.’

‘When?’

‘This evening.’

She shook her head, taking a long drink of the Bloody Mary.

‘Not seen it since it was charging on the kitchen counter this morning.’

It wasn’t on the kitchen table, or the dining table, or next to the landline where my charger lived. It wasn’t anywhere in the lounge. I ran up the stairs two at a time, checked the bedroom, bathroom, even – in desperation – checking William’s bedroom to see if he’d scooped it up with his cars.