One wrong try, two left. I tried to think when she had told me her password. June, maybe July. She was pretty conscientious about changing her password every six months or so. And what was the easiest way to do that? There was a chance that she had simply gone for the obvious solution.

My fingers typed: WilliamLuke4

An egg timer appeared on screen, then it went blank for a moment.

Bingo.

Her inbox appeared. My guess was right.

I scanned the list of emails. Forbidden territory. A strange, voyeuristic feeling like you get when looking over someone’s shoulder on the Tube, reading their Kindle. In the last few months I had caught glimpses of Mel’s inbox, but only for a second or two before she minimised the screen or shut her laptop or dragged another tab over the top of it to hide its contents. The reason for that secrecy was no longer a mystery.

There were only eighteen unread messages in the inbox, which was about one per cent of the contents of mine. Emails in the last few days from Amazon, a recruitment agency, Boots, offers from our local cinema. An email from a couple of days ago from her uni friend Sally in Worcester, most of it concerning the incompetence of Sally’s boss and the achievements of her two young sons in the swimming pool. No cryptic questions about another man, or mentions of me or our marriage. I came out of the email and marked it as unread, then started going through the subfolders one by one, looking for anything that looked like it might relate to Ben. Most of the titles looked pretty innocuous. Apple, Amazon, Car, Financial, Holidays, Insurance, iTunes, Jobs, Mobile, and so on. I looked in them anyway, scrolling up and down the list of archived emails. All routine. Nothing, as far as I could tell, from Ben. Next I went through the sent items, slowly at first, checking the sender, subject line and first line of every message that she had sent from her Gmail account in the last three months.

Nothing. Maybe there was nothing to find? She had obviously been good at covering her tracks while the fling with Ben was going on, but now she had promised the affair was over. After all, we were going to start again. Start afresh. It made sense. That was why she had deleted everything.

Or almost everything.

There were seventy-two emails in her deleted items – she was ruthless with her inbox and never liked to have more than she could see on the screen at one time. Delegate, deal with, diary or delete, that was her mantra with both work and personal email accounts. Most of the deleted emails were from the last few days. Special offers, circulars, marketing stuff, companies trying to sell product.

There was a liquid feeling in my stomach as I saw a message from an account named [email protected].