So, at just a shade after nine she was seated in the deep leather chair in his office in Ealing, watching the shafts of sunlight dance through his thick curly hair from the slatted blinds behind his desk. He was writing again and she wondered how many of his neat A4 notebooks he had filled with details of her psychological torments and the history behind them.

Now that she knew him so well – or, rather, that he knew her so well – she got pretty much straight to the point. ‘My mother is dead and I feel nothing,’ she said.

He explored this for some time before piercing her gloom with an observation that perhaps ought to have been more self-evident. ‘It’s often more complicated to lose a parent we don’t love,’ he said.

‘Oh, yeah?’ she replied.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because with your mother’s death has gone any potential of a better relationship, a reconciliation, a reckoning – or whatever it is that the wounded child within you really wanted.’

‘A better mother.’

‘That, too. I don’t suppose you ever stopped hoping that that woman was in there somewhere. Now you’ll never find her.’

Kate was silent for a long time. It was the observation Emma Johnson had astutely made at the wake. ‘Stuart came over from Moscow for the funeral,’ she said finally, as if it was a natural segue from what had gone before.

Dr Wiseman didn’t blink. ‘I thought he was banned from entry to this country.’

‘He is. I negotiated an exception.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Good question.’

‘What’s the answer?’

He was tapping the tip of the pen against the top of the page, which she’d noticed he did when he was surprised at a turn the conversation had taken. It didn’t happen often. ‘I told you we’d made an arrangement that I would take the children to meet him in France or wherever else he could get to.’

‘Yes. You thought it was important for their wellbeing.’

‘Well, on one of those occasions, we slept together – or had some …’ she stared at her hands ‘… sexual activity.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. The pull of the familiar, a desire to put the children first and give them the reconciliation they long for, a yearning to break free of the confusion of endlessly conflicted emotions.’

‘A test?’

‘Maybe.’

‘A chance to re-establish your power over him, to punish him even?’

Kate didn’t want to think of it like that. ‘I do still love him.’

‘And yet you cannot accept his betrayal, so a healthier part of you wants to move on?’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But it led to me agreeing to attempt reconciliation.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t know what I want. But I made the promise to the children, as well as to Stuart, so now I’m trapped. I don’t think I can go back on it.’

Dr Wiseman put down his pen and straightened out his jacket. ‘Let me ask you this. Have you forgiven your husband for his infidelity?’