Only her body had slept with Max, she told herself. Her mind had been completely faithful to her husband. It wasn’t as if she had wanted to do it. There had been no choice. Men like Max had got away with whatever they wanted to do for centuries. But now she wanted to make it up to Rav, to make him see that she loved him, and to try a fresh start.

The first day back at school after the summer holidays was always an inset day. Some of the other teachers complained about them. They were all about meetings and organization, piles of paperwork and red tape. But Chloe liked them. She liked going back to school when it had been resting for the summer, waiting and silent, ready to be filled with people and noise. When she was at school herself, she had always loved the moments when she had an excuse to leave a lesson, to go to the loo or take a message to another teacher, where she could wander the quiet corridors, knowing that the building was bursting with people but that she couldn’t see any of them. Then a bell would ring and the corridors would explode with teenagers, pushing, laughing, shoving. Her own school was very different to the one she taught at now. It had been a bog-standard comprehensive where she had been summarily ignored by the teachers because she didn’t make trouble and didn’t need much help. Her school now was quite the opposite. Prestigious. Ordered. Filled with girls who knew they were smart, knew they had potential for brilliance and intended to realize it. They loved Chloe’s drama lessons because they were a chance to try different things, experiment, step outside of themselves.

It had been Rav who had talked her into taking the job. She’d been teaching at an underfunded school which was on its knees, a forty-five-minute bike ride away. One day, two years after she had qualified, a child had spat at her and she’d come home in floods of tears. Rav had run her a bath, poured her a glass of wine and made a little speech. ‘I’m going to say the thing that I know you don’t want to hear,’ he had told her. ‘Go private. Don’t do it for you. Don’t do it for the longer holidays or the better pay. Do it for me. I need you to be here in the evenings, not marking until midnight. I need you to have weekends and proper holidays, and a sense of humour.’