She steels herself and goes into her bedroom. Or ‘the boudoir’ as she calls it, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, on her feeds. She’s had such fun making it a deliberately sexy, intimate, exciting space. It’s even got a cute little metal and velvet bar she salvaged from Paris. Oh God. Have Trent and Helen done it in here? Has Trent committed that ultimate sacrilege. Has Helen used her towels, her shampoo, her face creams?

The bed isn’t made, the scatter cushions falling from the chaise onto the floor with a recklessness that makes her picture Trent sitting up in bed and throwing them with force across the room. He knows how she likes the bedroom to be left tidily, as she often uses its petrol blue and gold chinoiserie walls as a backdrop for her lives and reels. There’s an empty bottle of wine by Trent’s side of the bed and a glass with an inch of drying claret.

Her mind can’t stop picking at the fact of her husband’s tawdry infidelity, as she re-stacks the scatter cushions in their careful colour order. Maybe on some fundamental level, she’s never really trusted him. Not after he pulled her in a bar in Mayfair and, after she slept with him on the first night, she found out that he was already engaged. He dumped his fiancée for her, which at the time he spun as the most romantic gesture ever, but now she sees it for what it was: cruel.

She hugs a brocade cushion to her chest, as she thinks about how cruel it is too that he’s shared his feelings with Helen and not her. He must have been having an affair before Jamie left. So Helen must have known how tense things had been at home. Now Maddy doesn’t know what bothers her more – the fact that Helen must have been gloating behind her back, or that Trent found solace in her arms, when Maddy had been hurting so much herself.

Trent and Helen. Helen and Trent. Has he fallen in love? More in love with Helen than he had been with her? Because he must have serious feelings if it’s been going on for three years. Three years. And everyone knew. Except her.

She thumps the pillow against the stack with unnecessary force. She’s always prided herself on being perceptive, so how didn’t she see what was going on right under her nose? Even in lockdown? She tries to think back over the past months and how, apart from on their wedding anniversary, there hasn’t been much sex.

There used to be a lot more. Years ago, she and Trent were at it like rabbits. But not since her menopause kicked in and she went on HRT. Trent had been patient and understanding. Of course he had been. He’d been getting his end away elsewhere.

Objectively speaking, she can see how Helen might have easily lured her horny husband. She was always a go-getter, that one. Maddy saw that the first time at the PTA meeting and Helen, who only had a child in year one at that point, was already intent on bossing the school fête.