‘Who is she?’

‘What?’

‘Who’re you fucking? There must be someone waiting in the wings or you wouldn’t be spouting this drivel.’

But he swore there wasn’t and promptly burst into tears.

Since starting therapy Greg had been more in touch with his feelings. He’d gone to treat his depression and it seemed to have worked. My bookish, gloomy husband had morphed into a cult member, bland and glazed, with a visible lifting of the spirits and a whole new vocabulary of self-awareness. No, self-absorption. Quite honestly, I preferred the old Greg, whose leaden footsteps on the stairs sounded like a man going to his own execution.

So there was no woman waiting in the wings, just his so-called ‘facilitator’, who seemed to have facilitated the end of our marriage.

The madness came later. At first I was simply shell-shocked. Everything unravelled so fast, because how can you fight someone who gently, and oh-so-patronisingly, makes it clear that he no longer loves you? Who says it’s not your fault, it’s his? Who’s attempting to relive his youth, or have a late-life crisis, or whatever the heck it was, leaving you to face the future alone?

There was, simply, nothing to say. Of course we’d had our problems but we’d always managed to talk. Now the rubber band had snapped and we’d sprung apart, two ageing strangers. Had it all been a delusion, those decades together? I listened to the cupboards opening and closing, his footsteps on the floorboards above, the rumble of his suitcase wheels. And then with a sorrowful hug he was gone, sprung free, without a single shouting match.

‘You’re such a wimp, letting him get away with it,’ said Azra. ‘You should’ve put up a fight.’

‘You can’t fight somebody back into love with you.’

‘Or gone for counselling, or something.’

The truth was, I’d thought Greg and I had been getting on fine in the past few months. His depression had lifted. We still held hands in the cinema. Now we’d both retired we were talking about walking the Coastal Path; we’d discussed selling up and buying a communal house where we could live with equally ancient baby boomers, playing Led Zeppelin and snorting coke. We’d given up flying so we spent whole evenings on the internet working out how to get to Italy by train. Anything but a cruise, was one of our running jokes. What a ghastly thought … a fifth circle of Hell … why on earth would anyone do it?

Though, actually, now I remembered, it was me who led these discussions. Maybe Greg’s mind was already elsewhere, plotting his release, wondering what to shed and what to take. Working out when to tell me. Rehearsing what to say to our middle-aged and far-flung children, who may or may not have seen it coming.

Or maybe it was an impulse decision, prompted by a single moment, an utterly irrelevant moment, like the sight of me slotting a tablet into the dishwasher. I no longer want to be married to this woman. Once he realised this, he was swept along helplessly and there was no turning back.