Her mother’s self-help books hadn’t, as far as Chloe could remember, had much to say about what to do when it transpired that your husband had been having an affair with your best friend, who was now dead, and that he was, at least in part, the reason she had died. So she had spent the following weeks sleepwalking. Going to work. Avoiding her friends. Ignoring the hundreds of calls from Rav. He had apologized a thousand times, and then, when he had finished apologizing, he had been defensive. ‘I know I cheated, but this was years ago. We were kids. We’ve built a whole life since then. I’ve forgiven you for what happened with Max. Why can’t you forgive me?’ Eventually, she supposed, she would tell him that she didn’t care that he had cheated on her all those years ago. It wasn’t the infidelity that bothered her. It was the fact that he had watched her constantly wondering what had happened to Zadie for almost the entirety of her adult life. He knew how confused and guilty and angry she felt. And all along it had been entirely within his power to wave a magic wand and make all that not knowing disappear. But he had chosen not to. That was the betrayal. But she didn’t feel ready to say any of that to him. And it made the constant ache in her chest worse when she allowed herself to think about the fact that her husband knew her so little that he wasn’t able to work any of it out. So instead she spent late nights and early mornings walking the pavements around her house, as if, if she could keep moving fast enough, she could escape everything that had happened. She slept alternately for hours and hours, and then not at all, falling asleep at her desk then staying awake all night. Trying to work out whether it was even possible to rebuild her life from here. Trying to forget Rav’s ashen face and Max’s expression of righteous anger. And then, before she had even begun to untangle the whole thing, she found herself with another, more pressing issue to deal with.