After a few minutes she had come back to her senses. She handed him the milk bottle.

‘You’d better be getting on with your invoicing,’ she told him.

‘Are you sure? I don’t like to leave you like this.’

‘I’m feeling much better, honestly.’

He hesitated but nodded. Giving her arm a squeeze, he walked towards the back door.

‘Alan?’

He turned and looked at her.

‘Thank you. And please, don’t tell anyone about today?’

‘I won’t say anything,’ he replied. ‘But you need to talk to Jack. You won’t feel better until this is all out in the open.’

She nodded. ‘I know. I will. Thank you.’

She really had intended on talking to Jack that evening, but then something or other had happened to distract her. Then the next day Freddy had a temperature and had to stay home from school and before she knew it, the opportunity had passed.

Looking back now, it was painfully obvious that she shouldn’t have bottled it all up inside. She should have dealt with it straight away. If she had, it probably wouldn’t have manifested itself in the way that it did. But she’d always been terrible at talking about her feelings and the longer it went unsaid, the harder it became to say it at all. So instead she tried to bury it.

But there was something else too, something niggling at her. She had enjoyed the intimate moment with Alan. He had listened so attentively to her as though, in that moment, she was the only thing that mattered in the whole world. She had always thought of Alan as a steady, perhaps even boring man, but now she saw him differently. She found herself thinking about him and wondering how different her life would have been if she’d married an Alan rather than a Jack.

Afterwards Jack would accuse her of wanting revenge against him for crimes that he hadn’t even committed, but she knew it wasn’t tit-for-tat that had prompted what happened next. It wasn’t a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the garden fence either. No, it had been far more basic than that. By chance, Alan had become her knight in shining armour when she needed help and, like all fairy-tale damsels in distress, she had fallen for her rescuer.

He came round to see her again, a couple of days later. She had just got back from court and was opening up her laptop when he appeared at the back door and she rushed to open it and ushered him inside. ‘Come in, it’s freezing out there!’

‘I hope you don’t mind me coming by,’ he said as he took off his dirty shoes and rubbed his arms up and down his jumper to warm up. ‘I saw that you’d come home early again, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to catch you on your own and see how you are.’

‘Not at all, it’s lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘I’m still horribly embarrassed about what happened the other week though.’