Can you just stop buying them? he’d say, his voice muffled by the tissue pressed against his face. I would nod, empty out their sour water in the sink, fold their stems into their faces, carry them out to the garden bin. And the next day, I would buy them again.

This was how things were now; somehow, for the first time in our marriage, I had become the quiet, almost obedient wife, Jake the angry man, barking. He was suspended from work after the picture went out, pending an investigation. He’d got the first reply on Boxing Day, the reaction delayed by turkey and pudding, choirboys singing carols.

What the fuck is this, Jake?

You okay J? Is this a joke?

He’d read them out to me, his voice getting louder with each fragment, every movement of his thumb. It was almost a relief: for the whole of Christmas Day I’d felt my mind becoming lighter than ever, its engine propelling my movements into overdrive, my heart threatening to split out of my chest.

As the boys had ripped open their toys, like starving people un­­­­­­­wrapping bread, I’d provided a rapid, high-­pitched ­commentary –

What is it, Ted? What’s Father Christmas brought you? A mini-­guitar? Amazing!

– while Jake filmed. He’d filmed even though we both knew how unsatisfying these videos were afterwards, when the gifts had long been abandoned, the preserved excitement of the day rendered distasteful, performative. My voice in these films was the worst representation of myself I could imagine: sickly sweet, wheedling, as though begging my sons to enjoy the toys we’d bought them.

I had tried to forget what I heard the night after the messages came. Stumbling exhausted to bed, using my hands to help me climb the stairs. For the first few seconds, I thought it was the children. The stifled, musical tones of crying in bed, mouth opening into damp cloth. I stopped, and listened. It was Jake, I realized: sobbing, making the same sound, over and over again.

Nothing had happened to Vanessa, he informed me one evening soon after. He was speaking through the bars of his fingers, his hands over his face, his rage so enormous that I feared – for the very first time since I’d met him – that he might hurt me, might pin me to the wall, as I’d seen my father do to my mother, bruising her wrists, leaving marks that she would cover the next day, pulling her sleeves over her hands.

It was my phone, he’d said. My email address. It looked like – like I’d done it deliberately, to get back at V.

V? I couldn’t help myself. I’d never heard him call her that before. V?

He raised his head, and I saw it: what I thought – my many-­layered outrage – counted for very little. It gave me no advantage; it carried no weight. Not any more.