‘Just for once, Chris, can you put your family before work? I’ve been waiting here for hours, worried to death. What is wrong with you?’ She was so worked up she didn’t see his tight jaw. She didn’t see his fists clench or his hand pull back. She saw the release though – smashed glass halted her diatribe and she looked in shock, but not surprise, at the broken picture frame, the two of them on their wedding day now criss-crossed with fractures.

‘What the fuck, Claire? Why do you never stop complaining?’ roared Chris, his voice reverberating off the walls. He was like a caged tiger, prowling, hunting and Claire knew she had to calm him down quickly.

‘I’m sorry – I was upset about Joshua and—’

‘You’re always upset! Has it ever occurred to you that maybe none of this would have happened if you hadn’t started working such ridiculous hours? If you hadn’t wanted change so much? If you couldn’t just be happy with the way things were?’

Claire tried not to retaliate. Trying to reason with him would only make it worse. She had to let him burn himself out. It could have only been fifteen minutes but it felt like a lifetime as Chris shouted and stormed his way around the house before finally leaving and slamming the door behind him. During that time, she didn’t move, she didn’t speak; she just kept perfectly still, too frightened to move. Tears silently poured down her cheeks and she was glad the boys were going to their grandparents for the night. Sometimes he came close to her and she almost lost her nerve but then he moved away perhaps not even trusting himself. As the door slammed behind him, Claire finally collapsed into an armchair, wrapping her arms around herself, crying softly.

*

Chris hadn’t always had an anger problem. It hadn’t been a constant companion throughout their marriage, a silent threat that could make its presence known at any moment. No, it had only started a few years ago when Claire had slid into depression, or what Chris and her mother referred to as her breakdown. Even then, his outbursts weren’t frequent, not by any means, and in a way that made it harder, because then his explosions were so easy to dismiss as isolated incidents.

But how many did you count before it went from someone just having a bad temper to someone having anger issues? It wasn’t a question Claire had liked to dwell on. The problem was that everyone had focused so much on Chris’s positive attributes – of which there were plenty, she reasoned – that they disguised anything negative. And by everyone, she meant literally everyone. Her parents, her friends, people from Castlefield who had seen Chris in the park playing with his sons.