My first reaction was to tell Jake: this is what marriage does to you, makes you borderless, even in circumstances like ours, when we were barely speaking, let alone touching. We communicated only along the most basic lines: essential facts relating to the bodily health and safety of our children, to food or collection times or illnesses. Nothing else.

But I still turned to him, my phone in hand. As I moved, Paddy moved too, pouring a cup of old, freezing water that had been sitting by the side of the bath over his brother’s shoulder. Ted let out a long scream, then began to sob. The boys had been arguing more than usual lately, had entered a phase where almost any daily fact – the colour of a cup, the order of bodies through a door – brought a sudden eruption of animosity.

Any idea of telling Jake was lost in Paddy and Ted’s anger, in their small bodies bundled in towels warmed on a radiator, their careful sounding out of age-­appropriate, nurturing reading material. There was no longer hour in our days, and none so full, our children climbing on us, closer and closer, as though trying to climb inside, to broach the divisions between our bodies.

Ted could only read a few words at a time, and soon got too tired to read at all, letting his head fall back against the pillow, his eyes closing briefly, opening again.

You read, Mummy.

For the first few sentences, Biff and Chip’s latest adventure kept my mind in its words, in the glowing key, the sea monster that Ted traced lazily with the tips of his fingers. But before long I found that I could both read and think, that my eyes and mouth could easily work independently, leaving my mind free to return to the message on my phone.

What possible reason could David Holmes have for wanting to meet me? I tried to remember what he looked like, but could only think of disparate details: a brown beard, flecked with white. Narrow, pale eyes – or perhaps he had only been squinting in the light. He was an academic too, Jake had told me, the same field as him and Vanessa, a full professor at a more prestigious university than theirs. It was coming back to me now: his air of self-­satisfaction at our Christmas party, at some departmental drinks thing, the sense that anything he experienced in these places could only be a passing amusement, a triviality moving across the depths of his life.

Ted yawned, and I let myself lean over and kiss his cheek, smell the musty goodness that collected under his hair, behind his ears.

Goodnight, my sweet one. Another kiss on his forehead: that was enough, I told myself. I kissed my children too much, I feared. I needed to limit it, to let them be.