‘Why? It’s your life, Lucas. I can assure you I don’t give a damn how you choose to live it.’

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn…’ he muttered.

‘Precisely. The children are the only thing I care about. Hence being here today. And I will be at Dylan’s graduation when he gets that far. And at their weddings, and christenings of future grandchildren. Apart from that, I am done.’

‘Yes, Esther.’ He spoke tiredly. ‘I believe that remains true for both of us.’

‘So, do the children know? About you and Heidi getting…?’ Esther found she could not quite utter the word.

‘Not yet… unless they noticed.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It’s rather recent, you see.’

‘You must tell them.’

‘Please be good enough, Esther, to refrain from telling me what to do. Of course I am going to tell them.’

‘Straight away.’

‘They’ve got a graduation party, for God’s sake. I’ll tell them tomorrow.’

‘Or I could tell them.’

‘Please don’t do that.’

He was clenching his fists inside his pockets, Esther noticed, containing his irritation, and it made her wonder how he was with his fiancée, whether Heidi was good at extracting the treasures of trust and warmth that she had believed in herself once upon a time; whether the two of them were truly happy. No doubt their sex life was. Fireworks between the sheets. Lucas was good at those, as many could testify. Esther swallowed. She was so beyond all this, picking at the wound of hurt; but somehow, the thought of someone else making Lucas happy – of keeping him faithful – was surprisingly hard. ‘How many were there, really?’ she asked quietly.

‘How many what?’

‘You know what, Lucas.’ It sickened her to be asking the old question again. But with the sapphire on Heidi’s finger, it suddenly felt as if a portcullis were coming down.

Lucas groaned, as one bored of a familiar complaint. ‘Really, Esther…’

‘Three, you said. Around conferences, you said. Long since done with, and just for sex, you said, because of my patchy interest.’ Her tone was snappy, but inside she was trembling, back in the thick of it. Emerging dazed from the college toilet that fateful day, believing Lucas to have retreated to hunker in his room on the floor below, she had found the mobile being snatched out of her hands. He wanted to explain, Lucas had pleaded, plunging the device into his pocket and launching into garbled explanations about periodically having lost his way, but now having truly found it again.