As Andy clicks off his bedside light, and we exchange terse goodnights, I try to reassure myself that he is behaving like any normal man. After all, he works hard at that hospital and the last thing he wants is to be harangued into giving medical diagnoses at home. If he were a chef, I wouldn’t expect him to whip me up a fabulous carbonara the minute he’d walked in through the door.

So, our marriage is probably fine. Isn’t it?

Chapter Four

Saturday, February 16

But it’s not. As it turns out, it’s not fine at all.

It’s because of the stars. That’s how I find out. In the city you don’t often see them shining so brightly, but tonight you can. They are sparkling entrancingly. It’s magical.

It’s around 10 p.m. and I’m standing in our back garden, looking up at them, still gripping the bucket from emptying our recycling into the wheelie bin. Remembering the app that Andy installed on his phone, I head back into the house to ask him if I can have a go with it. He was telling me how it can identify constellations when it’s pointed at the sky, and tonight is the perfect night for it.

‘Andy!’ I call out from the hallway.

‘In the bath,’ comes his voice from upstairs. ‘What is it?’

‘Oh, nothing …’ I’d forgotten he’d gone up for a soak. Izzy is over at Maeve’s on a sleepover, so it’s just the two of us in tonight. Spencer moved out four years ago, when he was eighteen. He dropped out of university in first year – it just wasn’t for him, he insisted, and there was no arguing with him – and we were thrown into panic about his future, but he got a job pretty quickly for a company that installs sound systems for gigs. He lives in Newcastle now, in a shared flat with two friends and a varied selection of fungi sprouting from the bathroom carpet. Whenever I ask him what his job entails he just laughs and says, ‘Lifting things, Mum,’ and ruffles my hair as if I’m a little kid.

I spot Andy’s phone sitting on the hall table, take it out to the garden and tap in his passcode. That’s weird; it’s been his date of birth for as long as I can remember, but now it doesn’t seem to work. He must have changed it. I try tapping in the full year – still no luck. Shrugging off a twinge of unease (why has he changed it?) I try reversing the six digits of his date of birth. Bingo, that was easy! I’m now in the inner sanctum of my husband’s telephonic device.