Harry had offered to give me a lift to the airport, but I’d refused. I didn’t want him to drive me back to my house afterward, either, for Tom to come out and see me saying good-bye. I wanted to keep that weekend to myself as something to cherish. It had taken a lot of persuasion and outright lies to get him to agree to my going on the trip. I’d told him there were other women going and that I’d be with them all the time. But then Tom insisted on taking me, saying I’d never find my car again if I left it in a multistory car park at the airport. He was probably right about that. At the terminal he kissed me good-bye as though he loved me. I guess he thought someone from work might see us; he’d always put on a good act in public. He told me he’d call me over the weekend; Harry and I had had contingency plans to deal with that.

As soon as I got out of the car, I didn’t give him a second thought. I know that’s wrong, but by that point I’d mentally separated from him. I knew I’d leave him one day; it was inevitable now. But still, even then, I wasn’t dreaming about leaving to be with Harry. I just needed to get out of my marriage.

Harry was so excited to see me. You would have thought we’d been apart for days rather than two or three hours. He was late, of course, so we hurried toward the check-in as soon as he arrived. A few people were ahead of us in the queue. I pulled out my passport and Harry took it from me to look at my photo.

“You don’t look very happy there.” He grinned at me to take the sting out of his words. “I know they say you mustn’t smile, but you didn’t have to take it so literally.”

Embarrassed, I took my passport from him and kept it closed. I’d renewed it three years before, when Tom and I were going through a bad time. He’d booked a holiday without telling me; two weeks alone with him in a foreign country was the very last thing I’d wanted. I thought I was in luck that my passport had run out, but he made me an emergency appointment with the Passport Office in Liverpool so that I could renew it the same day. My photo showed me looking exactly how I’d felt that day: depressed and fed up.

“Things were bad for me then.”