Katelin yawned, very suddenly, and said, ‘Jesus, I think I could sleep for a week. I’d love a bath, then I want to fall asleep in front of a film.’ The way she said ‘film’ as if she was trying to squeeze an extra syllable from the word: it was one of the things he’d fallen for, that Irish accent. Katelin Kelly, never, ever Kate – woe betide you if you made that mistake. She had an awkward streak all right, strong-minded and stroppy; what a handful his mother had thought her, so unbiddable and contrary. Katelin hadn’t wanted children, then she changed her mind but only wanted one, and from the start she’d scoffed at the idea of marriage and wanted always and for ever to be together only by choice. A major upset, she’d caused, in both families, but Dan had admired her immensely, thought her brave and bold and original. And now, as he kissed her on the cheek and got up to run a bath for her, he wondered, could she honour that freedom to choose, if he told her he loved her still, but loved another woman more, and differently? Not a chance. The guarantee on that arrangement had expired a long time ago.

‘Oh!’ she called out as he left the room. ‘I haven’t asked you about Hong Kong.’

‘Ah, that was work,’ he said, ‘it can wait,’ and his tread was slow on the stairs, and heavy. He felt oddly disappointed, as if Katelin had let him down, just by being herself.

Two days after she came home, he told her everything. There was no need, she suspected nothing, and almost certainly it was a selfish impulse, a way of making his relationship with Alison feel real, putting it out there in the world as a fact, so that he knew it wasn’t just a fantasy. Oh, he told himself that by telling the truth he was being respectful to Katelin, being open and honest, but it wasn’t that, he’d kept many secrets from her over the past thirty years: flirtations, semi-flings, a short dalliance years ago with cocaine, a current pot habit that was more regular than she realised. He hoped she’d kept a few secrets from him too, really he did, everyone was entitled to small bouts of bad behaviour, and if she’d parried with a story about how she’d had sex on the beach in Santa Monica, he’d have felt nothing but relief. But she didn’t. She just sat very still on the edge of their bed, and he watched all the newly acquired colour drain from her face as he told her, as gently as he could, that he’d fallen in love with Alison Connor, but it was over now.

‘The woman who wrote that book?’ Katelin asked, bewildered but at the same time feeling she’d known all along. Dan nodded.