And she’s enjoying it. She’s always been a martyr and she’s always sided with you; even when she knows you’re wrong. Oedipus and all that Freudian theory has a lot to answer for. I wonder how she’ll feel when she finds out you’ve been shagging my sister?

She knocks again and then I can hear her talking on her phone. I press my ear against the door but I can’t hear what she’s saying. It’s getting fainter and then it disappears, leaving me in the free-falling void that everything I do is carefully designed to avoid. The children. Charlie and Laura. I could have faced everything else, but not that.

When your solicitor’s threats didn’t work, you began to work on them, didn’t you? Insisting on taking them for half the week and spending the entire time auto-suggesting that I’m a piece of crap who’s off her rocker. Laura told me Daddy asked her if Mummy talks to herself. You gave them both emergency phone numbers to call if they didn’t feel safe.

You knew that you had no chance of getting legal custody of them, so you bided your time. Eventually, after several months, long enough to have built up evidence, you went to the family courts with a claim that I wasn’t coping. I opposed it, naturally, citing that you were about to leave the country on a year-long contract. There was no big courtroom drama like you would imagine it to be. It wasn’t even a custody hearing. The hearing was held round a table in chambers.

I was so stressed that I was crying and, despite my own counsel telling me to pull myself together, I couldn’t. You had put me under unbearable pressure. Broken me down little by little. And all I could imagine was that I was going to lose. That you would weave a wider web of lies and catch my children in it. My solicitor had told me that you stood no chance as you were working abroad and had conceded the marital home, and the children would be awarded to the parent who was most reliable.

What I hadn’t banked on was your mother. We’ve had an up-and-down relationship, with her classic ‘you’re not good enough for my son’ attitude mixed with a ‘you’re my confidante’ when she wanted something from me or needed to get to you through me. She had always assumed that when Charlie and Laura came along I would give up work and stay at home. Like she did. When that didn’t happen, she subjected me to a tight-lipped tirade of underhand comments, all designed to dent any self-esteem I had left after you had done your worst.