‘Me and Andy had a bit of a thing last night,’ I explain quickly. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right. I’ll tell you all about it another time.’ I mean it – I will tell her – but I can’t face it right now. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to talk sense.

‘I hate to say this, but you look exhausted.’

‘Well, yes, I am. But honestly, I’ll be okay,’ I say, trying to believe it myself. But God, the mess of it. A quarter of a century, we’ve been together: almost half of our lives. We have our two lovely children and live in a sturdy Victorian house in a leafy area of the Southside. We have plenty of friends, both individually and as a couple, and although I had my gripes, I thought we were basically solid.

How wrong I was. Why on earth didn’t I suspect anything? The going-off-sex thing, for instance. Now that makes sense. Have I been walking around in some kind of daze?

Thankfully, Izzy doesn’t notice anything’s wrong – not because my clumsily applied make-up has acted as a successful camouflage, but because she’s full of all the fun things she and Maeve have been up to.

‘Jules let us make dinner,’ she says proudly as we walk home.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I say, pausing from trying to count up all the lies Andy’s told me over the past few weeks.

What about the last time he was in Edinburgh, supposedly for his mate Colin’s fiftieth birthday? And the time before that, when I seem to remember he made a particular effort to look good for a talk in the National Library?

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, Izzy?’

‘I said, d’you want to know what we made?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course I do.’ I take her hand and squeeze it and she beams up at me.

‘Stuffed tomatoes.’

‘What?’ I exclaim. She’s terribly iffy about vegetables usually. Even peas can be shunned.

‘They’re Turkish,’ she adds. ‘Erol’s Turkish.’

‘Yes, I know he is, honey. What were they stuffed with?’

‘Um, rice, pine kernels, raisins …’

My God, a dried fruit component? For a moment, this seems even more shocking than Andy shagging Estelle Lang at the Crowne Plaza hotel. What is it about Jules that enables her to persuade children to enjoy such exotic delights? Then we turn the corner and that awful sense of dread settles back over me. Our house is in view now, no longer solid and safe, a cosy haven, but emitting anguish and doom.

Izzy drops my hand and runs ahead of me, barging in through the front door. I step inside to see her hugging her dad and feel as if my heart could break.

Chapter Six

Six days later: Saturday, February 23