I trusted my wife absolutely – always had – but she’d never been like this with me before. And her body language was all wrong: tucked in on herself, head down, hands clasped tightly together.

‘So what’s going on with him, Mel?’

She put her head in her hands and began to cry. I put an arm around her shoulders, pulled her close.

‘You can tell me anything, Mel. Anything at all. It’s OK, whatever it is. You know that, don’t you?’

A tear splashed onto the leg of my jeans. Then another. I let her cry for a minute, rubbing her shoulders, comforting her, the soft fresh scent of her perfume surrounding us both.

‘Just tell me,’ I said again. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I made a mistake. A couple of years ago.’

A lurching, sinking feeling started in my chest and moved down through my stomach.

‘A mistake?’

‘I’m so sorry, Joe.’ The breath caught in her throat. ‘It was so stupid.’

‘Try to calm down, Mel. It’s OK.’

‘Can’t believe I was so stupid.’

‘What do you mean, a mistake?’

She reached for a box of tissues on the bedside table, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Do you remember Charlotte and Gary’s wedding?’

‘The one with the ice sculptures and the free bar?’

‘That’s the one.’

Charlotte was another friend of Mel’s from university. She and Gary had got married in a posh ceremony in Highgate, followed by a reception at a fancy hotel set in its own parkland estate. William had just turned two. He’d begun to fidget and cry as the bride walked down the aisle so I’d taken him outside, where we spent the entire ceremony looking at the badges of different cars lined up next to the graveyard. Audi. Beamer. Ford. Say-dees.

‘What about it?’

‘Do you remember the evening do?’

I searched my memory. A lot of life was a blur when William had been that age, but this was the first wedding he’d been to, so it was more memorable than most.

‘Not much of it – didn’t I take William back to the hotel early for his bedtime? But you didn’t get back until after midnight and you woke us both up falling over the suitcase. Twisted your ankle. You had a massive hangover the next morning.’

She nodded but said nothing.

‘Something else happened at the reception?’

‘Yes,’ she said very quietly.

‘Involving Ben?’

‘You took Wills home early because it was past his bedtime, Beth went home because she had her yoga or something in the morning. There were loads of people there that Ben and I didn’t know, the DJ played some songs I remembered from uni and Ben asked me if I wanted to dance, then he got a bottle of champagne and we sat down and started talking. We had loads in common and talked for ages, about everything. Music, books, films, travelling, work. Future plans.’ After holding it back for so long, it was coming out in a torrent now as if she couldn’t stop. ‘We drank that bottle and then Ben got another, and eventually he said he’d fancied me for ages. Told me he couldn’t stop thinking about me, that I was his perfect woman, that he’d had a thing about me since I’d first visited Beth at uni, when we were both nineteen.’