I started the dinner. I could only make a few dishes, simple things mostly. I had a whole shelf of recipe books, like most people do, and I cooked from them, occasionally, in a new-­year burst of good intentions, or a sudden inclination following a dream. But these recipes never stuck, however simple. This is what stuck: a chicken breast, sliced into sections, each part lowered into a bowl of seasoned flour. Even seasoning the flour felt fancy, the faith that salt and pepper would somehow cling to the white powder and make some difference to the taste of the chicken. Cooking always seemed mysterious to me, the art of the unseen.

As I sliced the chicken, I noticed that it had changed, the fibres of the meat altered, more granular, the skinless surface almost opalescent. I am a woman whose husband is having an affair, I said to myself in my head, as though these words would make some difference to reality. Then I said them out loud, wanting to taste the phrase under my tongue, to pass its particular rhythms through my lips. I said her name.

Vanessa. The first times I saw her: laughing at our Christmas party. A soft handshake at a work do, then later: straight backed, clapping. A neat suit jacket, her hair tucked behind her ears. Where did she buy those jackets? I imagined that she had a personal shopper, someone who presented her with racks of almost identical jackets, described their subtle differences of tailoring. Vanessa Holmes. A raised eyebrow, plucked to a wisp, the tail of a tiny animal.

I noticed that I felt sick; I noticed this as you would notice that a book has fallen from a shelf: impartially, at a distance. When I was offered pethidine in labour with Paddy, they said it wouldn’t take away the pain, but it would make me care about it less. You’ll see it there, said the midwife, but it won’t matter to you. It appealed to me, this separate pain, but there was no time to take the drugs, as suddenly Paddy was coming, and the choice was gone.