It was never meant to happen. And when it did, it was only ever meant to happen once.

Jack was working away all week and Angie had come home early so that she could pick the children up later. She was working on a case about a woman who had been accused of assaulting her fiancé. Her mitigation was that she had found him on top of their kitchen table, having sex with one of the bridesmaids-to-be. Angie knew that the case was going to attract media interest and she felt sorry for the woman. She had reacted in a moment of humiliation and anger and as a result was going to have her name splashed across the papers. In her experience, women like that went one of two ways. They either hid away, avoiding attention and refusing to speak to anyone, or they sold the whole sordid story to the highest bidder. She wondered which way her client was going to go.

Yet the case had set her mind whirring. This woman had been convinced that her fiancé adored her but he was sleeping with her friend behind her back the whole time. He was even going to marry her, despite his affair. What kind of person does that, she wondered?

The same type of person as Jack?

He fit the profile after all. A previous track record of sleeping with plenty of women. Unpredictable behaviour. Disappearing for hours on end without telling her where he was going.

And then it hit her. She was just like the fiancée.

It was like a bolt from the blue. Suddenly she saw her past in a completely different light. Snippets of memories, small things she’d dismissed at the time, came back to her, loaded with new meaning.

When one of his female colleagues had started acting strangely around her for no reason, as though she felt awkward in her company, Jack had said it was because she was having personal problems. Was Jack the cause of those problems?

When a Sunday League football buddy of Jack’s made a comment about him being a love-rat, then quickly backtracked and claimed he was referring to his university era, even though he hadn’t gone to the same one as Angie and Jack. Jack had told her it was because they’d shared stories of their student days.

And then of course there was the pink thong. How quick she’d been to believe his story.

Had Jack been sleeping around behind her back? Were these late nights out really a front for his hook-ups with various women? Could he have been doing it, and getting away with it, for years? Did everyone know about it apart from her?

She had always told herself that she could trust Jack, that he’d never hurt her, not seriously. Yes, he’d been a bit of a party animal in his younger years but she thought she’d tamed him when they got together. Now she realised how naïve and stupid that sounded. You couldn’t tame someone. A leopard never really changes its spots. Jack had never changed, not really.