‘Not bad? It’s awful. The refuge firing me? It makes Mike look guilty as sin. And me, too, for standing by him. That’s what all these people think. But Bill, what else can I do?’ I honestly didn’t see. An allegation had been made, not proven yet. Mike was my husband, father to my kids, the same person I’d lived with all these years. Except. He wasn’t. He was the man who’d slept with Karen, in our house. A cold shiver ran through me, as if my body was rejecting what he’d told me. If he’d told me that, he must have told me the truth about everything. Right? Why else would he?

‘It’ll be OK,’ Bill said again. But he couldn’t know that.

I unlocked my phone and held it up to him. It was open on a Twitter search for my name. Disloyal bitch. If my wife left me in the shit like that I’d be on to a divorce lawyer. That was the men’s side, wondering why I wasn’t publicly supporting Mike. It wasn’t only men, in fact. But worse, much more hurtful, was the feminist response. I’d thought that was my side, but now they were turning on me. Why hadn’t I spoken out yet? Why so silent, Ali? ‘They hate me. Both sides hate me.’

‘Who cares what people think? You don’t know them. I hate all this, this social media mob. We aren’t meant to know what other people think in this level of detail.’ Bill set down my phone at a slight distance and pushed the glass towards me. ‘Drink. It’ll help.’

I gulped down the burn of heather and smoke. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘Well, there’s the hearing tomorrow. He’ll get bail, most likely. Then he can come home.’

‘But can he work? Will they fire him?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not proven until the trial, so I don’t see that they can fire him, no. They might suspend him, but they’d have to keep paying him at least.’

Bill was so comforting. I remembered bashing on his door late one night, in a panic over a Chaucer essay I hadn’t finished. He told me to say I’d been ill, hand it in the following week, and then we’d sat up drinking and talking. I’d felt so grown-up. Bill was the only student I knew who had a bottle of whisky in his room, and even when I mixed it with Diet Coke he’d looked devastated, but said nothing.

‘I’ve still been fired from the refuge.’

‘Well, it’s only voluntary, isn’t it? Why not pull in your horns a bit – look after the kids, lay low? Wait till the trial.’