How can you not suspect that I’m asking you all these questions and sitting here with this knowing smile on my face because I know? Don’t you care if I know?

Maybe you don’t mind me knowing you’re lying as long as I don’t know why.

Charlie’s relationship with her sister had changed beyond all recognition. Though on the surface it appeared the same as it had always been, Charlie now had to produce convincing conversation – things she might have said to Liv before – while in her mind, always present behind her spoken words, flowed a soundtrack no one but she could hear: You big fucking massive shameless liar. Why do you think you can do this? How can you imagine I might believe you, knowing I have a brain in my head? And Simon? Do you really think he’d fall for it?

Suspecting that Liv and Gibbs had pretended to split up rather than actually split up, Simon and Charlie had subtly spied on them for a while. They’d followed them to Cambridge and discovered that their accommodation there was a double room at the DoubleTree by Hilton Garden House hotel. They’d followed them, unobserved, and seen them holding hands and kissing in the street – all of this while, according to what Charlie had been told, Liv was in Dublin reporting on a literature festival for the Observer.

The most surprising thing about those days in Cambridge was that Liv and Gibbs had been out for lunch once and dinner once with another couple that Simon and Charlie hadn’t recognised: an Asian man and a white woman. Both had looked friendly and respectable, but couldn’t be, Charlie had decided. Whatever peculiar, underhand thing was going on, chances were it involved them too. Liv and Gibbs didn’t have friends that she and Simon didn’t know about. If they’d kept these people secret, there had to be a reason for it.

In any case, they certainly hadn’t broken up as advertised. Instead, after several years of having a relatively open affair that they freely discussed with Simon and Charlie, they’d suddenly announced that they were no longer an item, and they’d stuck to their lie ever since. Simon had recently decided to wash his hands of the whole thing; it was Liv and Gibbs’ business and no one else’s, he’d told Charlie one day. She’d barely been able to believe it. Her feelings on the matter hadn’t changed at all, and could be summed up as follows: if she didn’t find out the truth in the next five seconds, she’d swell up like a big black boil and burst.