There was a long pause. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t recognize that name … you must have the wrong number.’ Leo already sounded bored.

‘Bella’s husband.’ Ben waited for the words to land before continuing. ‘Is she there?’

There was a brief pause, before he answered. ‘No. She left a couple of hours ago.’

Although he had been fairly sure that Bella was with Leo, hearing it confirmed was like a blow to the stomach. He felt the bile rise in his throat. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words would come out.

‘Look, mate,’ said Leo. ‘I’m not interested in getting involved in your relationship. But she’s playing you for a fool. You need to toughen up a bit and have some respect for yourself.’

Ben gasped, hurt and anger still rendering him speechless. Bella having an affair with this guy was one thing, but discussing Ben’s failings with him was a whole other level of humiliation. Finally, he found his voice: ‘You don’t know anything about me, so don’t you dare tell me what I should and shouldn’t do!’ A deeply buried, boiling rage was bubbling up inside him and he was glad that Leo wasn’t standing within reach, or he would have been in serious danger.

‘Actually,’ Leo said, with a malicious-sounding roll of his tongue. ‘I think you’ll find that I know everything about you, mate. Even more than you know yourself.’

‘Bullshit!’ Ben fired back, overwhelmed with hatred for this pompous-sounding creep.

‘Oh yeah? Bullshit, is it? Well, how about if I tell you that I knew your father, for starters?’

‘So what?’ Ben thought about hanging up, not wanting to let anything Leo said get to him. It had been a mistake calling him in the first place.

‘But obviously I didn’t know him as well as Bella knew him …’

Something about his tone of voice made Ben’s blood run cold but he refused to acknowledge it. ‘Of course she knew him! He was her father-in-law.’

Leo chuckled and Ben could hear him lighting a cigarette. Somewhere in the back of his brain he registered that Bella had sometimes come home smelling of smoke. ‘He was a bit more than that,’ Leo said, exhaling slowly and deliberately.

Ben’s mouth dropped open in shock.

‘Oh, come on!’ Leo continued, when Ben didn’t reply. ‘Seriously, mate, don’t tell me you never suspected?’

Ben closed his eyes, as if by doing so, he could somehow make the words go away. Make them unheard. ‘No,’ he heard himself whisper hoarsely. ‘You’re lying.’

‘You know I’m not. She only ever got with you to get back at him for dumping her.’

There was a sudden tightness in Ben’s chest and he knew he needed to stop Leo talking, before he could inflict any more damage. ‘I’m hanging up,’ he hissed, dizzy with the sheer horror of it.

With shaking hands, he reached for the ‘end call’ button, but before he could get to it, he heard Leo’s voice, as he shouted his final onslaught: ‘And to make him pay for his kid! It’s not even your kid, mate. It’s your father’s!’