Yes, he had messed up big time, but there had been reasons. But even after those long, endless months and months of sleepless nights were finally behind them, Esther had often carried on falling asleep on the sofa-bed in the children’s room, laying claim to the moral high ground by citing exhaustion from whatever domestic challenges had been going on during the day. Lucas’s own fatigue, meanwhile, brought on by working his socks off to keep food on the table and the bills paid, had never seemed to count for anything or to elicit sympathy; not even during the early, hardest baby years, when he sleepwalked through his lectures half the time, spouting his notes like an automaton. In fact, Esther had weaponised motherhood, Lucas concluded viciously, rather pleased with the thought and how it justified the consolation he had eventually taken to seeking – discreetly and sporadically – albeit over a period of time the length of which was rather less justifiable. Yet, no deceiver could have been more careful or more considerate either, finding equally discreet partners for his liaisons, none of them based in his home town, and each as keen as he was for excitement and distraction rather than any sort of full-on relationship. That Lucas had got so good at spotting such partners was one of the reasons it had proved a hard habit to break; but never once had he wanted to leave Esther, or end the marriage. Indeed, to have been found out when he’d believed all of it really was well and truly behind him remained a twist of bad luck so darkly ironic that Lucas still found it hard to contemplate without pain. The bloody mobile. He had briefly charged it for one last look before destroying the SIM, and then not quite got around to it.

Caught in a crowd waiting for a pedestrian light to go green, Lucas swayed a little as an echo of the old despair stirred: watching Esther drive away, the tops of her and Dylan’s fair heads just visible over the luggage. Only the presence of his chalk-faced daughter, standing stiffly in the doorway behind him, had stopped him falling to the ground and howling like a dog.

But now he had Heidi. His fiancée. Happiness pumped through his veins. The night before, returning from the bathroom to find him on bended knee with the ring box open on his palm, she had cried, ‘Yes please, Lucas!’ before he had even got the words out. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes,’ she had repeated, between hauling him to his feet and kissing his face and gazing, transfixed, at the glittering blue jewel that slid easily onto her finger, so big it looked like a bauble on the hand of a little girl.