No one would notice if I slipped away early. I sometimes wonder if anyone would notice if I didn’t turn up at all. But I have my research deadlines. My job allows me to maintain the aura of respectability that I almost lost. That’s what pisses you off, though. My success. I’ve always excelled at my job, despite everything. It’s an umbilical cord to keeping my lifestyle outside work, which, to be honest, wasn’t that good recently, until today. But now I realise why. Everything was leading up to now, when I would finally have my answers. I’d been in limbo.

By four o’clock I can’t bear it any longer. I see my reflection in the monitor, my pupils large, yet to all intents and purposes I look normal. Inside I’m anything but. My stomach is churning, a kind of turmoil that precedes a major discovery. When you know there’s something big on the other side, but you don’t know exactly what it is.

So I drive home and my fingers tap on the steering wheel at the traffic lights as I imagine you getting the call from the delivery people. I can pre-empt your reaction because I know you. Anger, because you wanted to come back here and start again. And straight away I’m somehow involved. Feigned worry that I will have your address, because you always do your best to keep up the pretence that I’m a psychopath. But the cases will arrive and you will breathe a sigh of relief until you know I’ve got your holdall.

You’ll ring the delivery company and demand that they pick it up. I’ll tell them that I never had it and it must have got lost, like your other luggage. Why did you check it in the hold, anyway? Then I remember you like to carry just a novel and a trendy messenger bag on – image is everything to you, isn’t it?

You might even phone the police, but this time it’s you who can’t prove anything. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Turning it over in my mind. Everyone, even the police, work on the most likely explanation. Like when you painted yourself as a picture of glowing innocence and me as the screaming harpy? So, in the end, who did everyone believe? The calm, collected, secretly serial-cheating fucker or the manic, on her last nerve, desperately-in-love wife?

Horrible, isn’t it, Jack? Knowing someone is lying but unable to prove it because there’s another perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s happened?