“I know another couple who are having an affair, in a similar situation,” Simon told her. “He’d leave his wife for her like a shot, but she won’t leave her husband. She’s always claimed it was because she didn’t want to hurt anyone, but it’s not that—it’s a strong preference for fantasy over reality. He, the man, wants a happier reality. He’s practical, a realist. She’s a big kid at heart, with her head in the clouds, and wants to keep it there. Whether she realizes it or not, she believes that if you let your ideal, fantasy man become your day-to-day reality, it’ll spoil the fantasy. The only way to keep the fantasy alive forever is to get yourself fixed up with a less inspiring reality from which you’ll regularly want to escape.”

And then you pretend to split up and you announce your separation . . . why? Simon didn’t have even the stirrings of a theory in relation to Liv and Gibbs’s fake breakup. Perhaps the mistake was to assume it was fake. Could it be true: they’d stopped sleeping together, reinvented themselves as platonic best friends? Charlie said definitely not.

Dragging his mind away from the puzzle, Simon said to Paula, “I think you’re similar to her, this other woman I know. You prefer fantasy to reality. You want to keep what you value most highly out of your real, everyday life. Hence Hannah for Damon, and Fergus Preece for you. That’s the devastating truth you’re determined to keep from Hannah: not that her husband was sleeping with you, not boring old normal adultery, but that he was using her to please you from the second he laid eyes on her. He needed a wife in place in order to satisfy the requirements of the woman he really loved: you.”

“Have you finished?”

“No,” said Simon. “Damon met Hannah in late November 2011, less than two months after he first met you, and he appeared to fall in love with her immediately. He married her in March 2012. You were strict with him, weren’t you? I bet you refused to let him lay a finger on you until he’d found himself someone to marry. You said, ‘Find a wife and make her happy, so that you stay married to her, and then I’ll be your . . . other woman.’”

Paula laughed. “You make it sound so delightfully quaint,” she said.

“It took you slightly longer to find Fergus. There was probably a list of characteristics the two spouse stooges needed to have. You and Damon drew it up together. I’m trying to think what Hannah Blundy and Fergus Preece have in common. Fergus owns all that land, but Hannah’s not a landowner, she’s not rich—”