I couldn’t compute. It was all so messy. I hated mess. I had thought that my arrangement with Karl was specifically so as not to have mess in our lives. He could have chosen anyone at all, so why her when it was so clearly a destructive move? Or had this been part of his plan all along? How had I been so easily manipulated?

I heard him letting himself in at last, closing the door, locking it behind him – the guardian, the protector of the house returned. I listened to his footsteps climbing the stairs and I thought I was going to panic, be unable to hold it together. I quickly grabbed one of the books and pretended to read, the bookmark now on my lap, her words of love scrawled across me. He was on the landing outside the bedroom. I wondered how on earth I was going to be able to look at him.

‘Hi,’ he said, hanging his jacket over the kimono. ‘Good evening?’ he asked with a yawn.

‘Yup,’ I said, my voice surprising me with its calmness. It turned out that I could bear to look at him; it was he who couldn’t bear to look at me. In fact I became mesmerized by him. How often in life do we get to knowingly observe a con, to witness the enacting of pretence, the lie so blazingly authentic? Momentarily I felt lofty, from up here on my high horse trotting along the path of righteousness.

He yawned again. Yes, he always yawned when he lied, I’d noticed that when he was on the phone to his family. I just hadn’t noticed it in relation to me before. He was putting on a great display of tiredness as he got undressed. He was nearly naked now, fresh from her touches and clutches; I searched his coelacanth skin for mating marks. He would not be getting in this bed, that was for sure.

‘How was work?’ I asked, again surprised by my own voice. I sounded casual. I put down my book for the showdown. If he hadn’t been so pickled in his own deviancy he might have noticed that it was upside down and my hands were trembling.

‘We met in a pub actually.’

‘Oh, which one?’

‘Coach and Horses.’ He was quick.

I let him see me clocking my phone. ‘That’s late, was there a lock-in?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He was taking off his socks now, sitting on the bed, his back to me.

‘You didn’t pop in anywhere on the way back home then?’

‘No,’ he said, pairing the socks, rolling them up, leaning over to put them in the drawer in a suspicious display of tidiness.

‘Not even Ness’s?’

He paused. Squirm, you fuck-face.