I got the boys out of the bath, lifting each of them high, rubbing their hair, pretending to be some kind of robot – the drying robot! – blowing raspberries in their necks. They went along with it, laughed at me, leaned back their heads and let me do it. Ted snuggled in my armpit after, wriggled with delight. But as Paddy brushed his teeth I saw him watching me, his eyes tipping down, something like suspicion making them narrow, his mouth full of toothpaste foam. He watched as I flipped the plug up, as I grabbed the bath mat, shaking it vigorously, scooped dirty socks from the floor with one hand while guiding the toothbrush back in Ted’s mouth with the other.

Are you okay, Mummy?

For their sake, I tried to calm down. Surely there were plenty of explanations for lateness; accident, illness, mechanical failure. Terrorist attack. Or: Jake could have decided to go for a drink with a colleague. He had done that before. I watched a wave of my own ignorance gathering at the edge of my thoughts, low, like tsunamis seemed to be from a distance, threatening to overtake everything.

How, I wondered, had I believed him so many times, barely even listened, in fact, to his excuses? Often, I knew, I was relieved when he didn’t come home. After a day of the children’s bodies soaking into me, I wanted nothing more than quiet, bathwater, my own skin. I had always needed a lot of time alone; in this way, you could say I was unsuited to marriage from the start. But we were happy, for a long time: I knew we were. There were pictures of us from the day we got engaged, standing at the top of a hill. Our faces were so young they seemed to blend into the sky. We were squinting, disappearing, our grins almost erased by the sun.

As soon as Ted was asleep I gripped the padded bed rail, swung my legs over his heavy body. I went into the bathroom, stood in front of the full-­length mirror. I could barely see myself; I pulled down the blinds, switched on the light. My dress was damp under my arms and lightly stained with the oil I had fried for dinner. My mascara was smudged across my cheek. I had to ask the question, at last: how did I compare? I knew what she looked like; this was not the question. I even knew what she smelled like; I had smelled it on Jake a few times, I realized now. Shower gel, laundry detergent. Something else, from deep inside her.

Vanessa. I gripped the sink, retched into the plughole. Horrifying, how plugholes are, when you look closely. Some kind of slime, a greenness, reaching. I knew it would never go away, no matter how many chemicals I poured in.

Just sex.