Since when did Vix work Sundays? Sundays were for roasts and films and walks in the woods, not the office. Or maybe I was hopelessly out of touch and wrong to nag Mike when he checked his emails over the weekend or went up to London on Saturdays. Maybe this was expected now. I made a distracted note to bring it up in her next supervision.

I shouldn’t have gone out. I should have been at home, tidying and smoothing and caring for the kids, trying to restore our home to itself, not a crime scene, not the place where all this happened. Where my husband had slept with my best friend. But I just had to get out, even for an hour, breathe some air that wasn’t full of secrets and lies. I left Cassie looking after Benji and she seemed relieved, as if she too wanted me gone. Knowing, maybe, that we’d have to have a talk about her sneaking out, that I’d have to discipline her in some way. Usually I would have asked Mike to do it, since she was far less likely to fly off the handle with him. But he wasn’t here. That was something to be dealt with later, when this crisis was averted. Because it had to be, surely. I still didn’t believe it would go to trial. The magistrate would see it for what it was, ridiculous.

Benji had looked so miserable when I went, I asked him to look for Mike’s jumper, as Anna had suggested. A project. He loved rooting around in the garden, and this would give him something to do. I wondered, though, why the police hadn’t found it when they searched the place. If someone had come into the garden, as I still hoped might be the case, could they have taken it with them? It didn’t make sense. Probably it was in the house somewhere, carelessly tossed aside.

I put in the code for the office doors, concentrating hard. If you got it wrong three times the police were called automatically. We had to be careful. The office was empty, the air conditioning humming gently. Vix was not at her desk but in the lobby, on the sofa we’d had put in there to make it warm and welcoming. Two cups of coffee in cardboard holders were on the low table. I thought if I drank any more caffeine my heart might pump its way right out of my chest.

‘Ali. Are you alright?’ I saw from her face that she knew what was going on.

‘How did you find out?’ Naïvely, I’d thought we could contain this, that only the police and the six of us knew. Nine, including the kids.

She indicated her phone, which was also on the table. ‘You haven’t seen? It’s already on Twitter.’

‘What? How?’