When she thought about the second woman – and she had distantly when she’d been younger; how her life could potentially be upended by someone she didn’t know – it was always with a sort of black amusement. And when she said things that were improper – lines about her current situation that were just slightly off, the dry delivery of which was the reason why her friends were her friends – she had to admit, if only to herself, that she never imagined she would be the second woman.

That afternoon, still within their first six months in Paris, she went to an art exhibition. Exhibitions were something she was trying out, attempting to adjust to their sophistication, their unique shush. She moved up and down the staircase, cheapening the place with the cut of her clothes, searching for her soul at a frantic pace that suggested she was rummaging through a demolition site for the remains of her belongings rather than spending a pleasant few hours in a museum. She was not alone. The boy was with her, suspended from school for the day, a fact to which he was largely indifferent. At only nine years old he had learned to handle disappointment and failure with the sort of grace that, in her early thirties, still escaped her. He set the tone for the afternoon, ignoring her under the pretence of looking at paintings of nondescript benches. In a corner of the exhibition, there was a cage with two stuffed parrots. The woman spent an unnatural amount of time staring at them. They seemed as if they had been there forever, loving and admiring each other. How could they leave? They were behind bars. Nobody knew what happened in the tiny parameters of their cage.

Recently, at a dinner party, with her husband’s new colleagues she had – seized by the closeness of the couple, the sudden tininess of their Parisian apartment – explained that at home, in the Irish countryside, all of the houses were built far apart, with long driveways, so you could easily get away from your family. She did the smooth, fluid motion of a driveway with her hands.

‘They are legally obliged to be that way,’ she said.

Afterwards, she felt stupid, like she had revealed more than she intended. The woman half of the couple, wearing heavy, intimidating jewellery that implied intellectual heft, suggested that perhaps that was only in her family. Perhaps, she agreed. Therapy, she considered, as she flipped through the art books in the gift shop – their pages full of unnerving, confusing beauty – was also something new she could try.