I swallow my pride, forcing myself to believe that the truth will out. If I don’t, I may as well ask them to handcuff me now because they seem pretty set on me knowing more than I’m letting on. They wouldn’t be wrong though, would they? It takes all my willpower not to bang my head against the wall. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I just tell them the truth in the very beginning? It had seemed insurmountable then, but not half as much as it does now.

I walk in, looking at the home I love being ransacked by strangers. It doesn’t feel any different from how I’d imagine it would feel if they were burglars looking for valuables. It’s just that the valuables the police are hoping to find don’t exist.

‘Is this the only computer in the property?’ calls out Robson, from the dining room.

‘My husband Leon has his own system set up in the spare bedroom,’ I say wearily.

‘And where is Mr Chandler right now?’ asks Robson.

‘At work,’ I say, hoping that suffices, because I really do not want to be answering questions about his whereabouts and the current state of our marriage.

I pull myself up, swallowing down the threat of tears as I wonder how we’ve all but fallen apart in such a short space of time.

But then I wonder if I should really be that surprised. It was always going to happen at some point; in fact, my subconscious has probably spent the seventeen years since we first met waiting for it.

If I’m honest with myself, it’s what I’ve done with every relationship I’ve ever had. Certainly before Leon, I would almost go out of my way to destroy it before it had the chance to destroy me. That way, I felt I had some control over the way people treated me, but in reality, it was my defence mechanism kicking in.

It’s still a great surprise to me that Leon had somehow slipped through the net, especially when he’d come so close to being caught up in it. Because despite his concerted efforts to woo me in the reading room of the New York Public Library with the promise of coffee and bagels, he wasn’t quite so convincing when I’d spotted him in Central Park with his arm around another woman.

We weren’t dating, but the man I’d shared my thesis woes with had certainly not shared the fact that he was with someone else. I’d avoided the library for weeks after that, unable to bear the thought of him waxing lyrical about how pretty my eyes were or asking when I was going to let him take me out.