‘I’ve just got back from shopping,’ she says, ominously. She has a way of saying the most unwelcome things in such a lovely, mellifluous tone that it catches you unawares. She’s been catching Cullen unawares for years. He really should have spotted from the moment he met her, he close to finishing his PhD, she a new graduate, that the Hon. Veronica Fanshawe-Drew would prove to be a money pit. Even then he saw that she was a daddy’s girl, dreamy and fun-loving but also spoilt and hopelessly impractical. One time, he remembers, she spilled hot sauce on her dress and, rather than wash it, threw the thing away. He should have read the runes right then. But he’d had so little experience with women, he was so completely naïve, and God, Veronica had such energy, she was so absolutely charming and so physically beautiful whilst being so completely unlike her. More to the point, she seemed so impressed with him, that he couldn’t help being won over. She appeared to have it all. A beautiful loft apartment in central Manchester, a paid internship in an art gallery and family with money. She was the only person Cullen had ever met who bought art. The thought she might be the sort of woman who would require financial upkeep didn’t occur to him. Within months Cullen had moved into Veronica’s loft apartment. Fourteen weeks later the Fanshawe-Drews lost everything in the financial crash and Cullen discovered that the flat was heavily mortgaged. Still Cullen thought everything would be fine. He and Veronica were happy and, with his newly minted PhD and the offer of a lectureship at Manchester Metropolitan, he felt secure enough to ask her to marry him. After they returned from honeymoon Veronica began to complain that the funding cuts made her job impossible and she wanted to leave. Cullen focused his own energies on finding a better paid job. A senior lectureship came up at Avon, Cullen applied and got it. The pay was modest but Cullen didn’t tell Veronica that. They moved to Bristol and Cullen was shocked by how much more expensive than Manchester it was. Veronica drifted for a while then managed to use her contacts to swing a part-time job at the Bristol Art Gallery. Everything seemed to settle until Veronica came home one day to say she’d spotted her dream home, a Georgian villa on the northern fringes of Clifton. It was way more than they could afford but Veronica wouldn’t be persuaded out of it. Her father called in a few favours to secure the couple a mortgage and seven weeks after Veronica had first spotted it in the estate agent’s window, the house was theirs, or rather, it was mostly the bank’s. Perhaps only the study and the downstairs cloakroom truly belonged to them, but over the years that would change as the mortgage was paid. With two salaries it would be manageable but they couldn’t afford to be complacent. A year into the job at Avon Cullen vaulted over Mark Ratner to take the position of head of department and increased his salary by twenty per cent. A year after that he was promoted to dean. It was around that time Veronica started complaining of stress and before long she’d left the gallery with no plans to work again. So far as Cullen could tell, she now spent much of her time at the gym or in the café inside the gym or window shopping. He’d wanted a lover and a wife but it seemed to him increasingly that he’d become the keeper of a very expensive exotic pet. That’s when, for him, the loneliness set in. Her desire for a baby only made things worse. Strangely, he still loved her, though it would have been easier if he didn’t.