‘Christ, Mel, I’m interested in you too!’ I said. ‘Because you’re my wife! We’re married!’

She dissolved into a fresh bout of tears at that, and I began pacing the room, waiting for her to calm down enough so that she could carry on.

‘I was bored,’ she said finally in a shaky voice. ‘The same routine, every day. Work, commute, home, bed. This was exciting, different. He was exciting. I know it’s no excuse.’

‘So you slept with him because you were bored?’ I said.

‘No. Well, a bit. Not just that. He looked at me the way men used to look at me.’

‘Men still do look at you that way, Mel.’

‘They don’t, not really.’

‘Yes they do. I’m one of them.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘You were bored with me, then.’

‘No,’ she said unconvincingly.

‘But this is our marriage, our family, our home,’ I said. ‘This is life, this is how it is. Life is not a roller coaster all the time, sometimes you have to just get on with it and look forward to the next good thing.’

‘Is that true, though?’ She looked up at me. ‘Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and try to think what I was looking forward to about the day. And there were days, weeks sometimes, when I couldn’t think of anything. Nothing at all.’

I looked down at her and wondered at the size of the void that had grown between us. Whether it could ever be bridged.

‘Some days are like that,’ I said. ‘You just have to get through them, keep going, and get past them. Some days you just have to be satisfied that nothing bad happened. There are big days and small days, and big days are not always good. But sooner or later you get past them as well.’

‘That’s what my mum thought, too.’

That brought me up short. Mel’s mum Pamela had suffered a psychologically abusive marriage for twenty years but she had stuck it out, month after month, year after year, all the while planning to leave her husband as soon as her daughter reached eighteen and went to university. On the day Mel got her A-level results and a place at Nottingham University, her mum was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She had died barely four months later, never fulfilling her dream of escape.

‘Your mum was . . . that was a tragedy. I can’t imagine what that was like for you. She was so, so unlucky, but she’s not you, Mel.’

‘She waited for her life to get better, she planned for it, but it never did. She ran out of time.’

After the funeral, Mel had found a notebook among her mum’s possessions – lists of all the things that Pamela had planned to do, all the places she would go, once she freed herself from the domineering husband who hated flying, foreigners and ‘funny’ food. But that freedom never came. For years afterwards, Mel said she cried whenever she looked at that notebook. She had only ever shown it to me once; as far as I knew, she still kept it somewhere.