‘Sorry to wake you,’ Michael said, ‘but there’s something I need to say before you go to Sydney. I’m in love with someone else.’

‘What? Repeat that.’

‘It came as a shock to me, too. Her name is Therese and I’ve known her about six months.’

Emily sat up in bed. ‘You idiot.’

‘We need to talk about this more, but not now. I’ll send you an email tomorrow.’

‘You’re going out in the middle of the night?’

‘I should leave, don’t you think?’

‘You tell me you’re in love with someone else and then rush out the door to fuck her?’

‘Jesus, Emily. My timing is bad, I know that.’

‘Bad timing?’ she said. ‘Bad timing is when you drive over a level crossing and a fucking train kills you.’

Michael left the bedroom door open, the hallway lights on in their Kensal Green flat. For the rest of that morning, Emily lay in bed trying to convince herself of the inalterable actuality of what had happened to her marriage. She stared up at a light fixture in the shape of an armillary sphere until her alarm sounded, then she got out of bed, into the shower, out the door and onto the tube automatically, on a trajectory already assigned. At the terminal she had the terrifying thought she might be pregnant—for a moment her mind seized up and split helically as it had the night before (what felt like five minutes ago) when Michael told her about beloved Therese. At Boots she bought ClearBlue, and in the departure gate bathroom she peed on the strip while a cleaner slopped water over the floor of the next cubicle.

Three minutes later the test came up negative. The previous month a negative result wouldn’t have produced this heavy surge of relief—a bitterly underlined form of relief. The image of one solid line on a stick drenched in piss, Emily thought, said more about the Michael situation than she was presently capable of expressing. Her neck hurt. They called her flight for boarding.

When she took her seat on the plane it seemed wrong that she wasn’t still at home, furious, because she felt thrown into abeyance, cheated out of a full response. Michael would be relieved she was leaving the country. He must have viewed the trip as a convenient break in their routine, the coward, and timed his confession to avoid a proper confrontation. Over the plane’s intercom an air steward announced the current time and temperature in Singapore—Emily’s layover on the way to Sydney—while she swallowed twenty-five milligrams of diazepam and opened a New Yorker magazine and closed it again as the plane shot up in what felt like a sequence of jumps.