I remembered the ride home from the funeral. Christian speechless, staring at my legs in the black tights, as if he missed me already, as if he knew what he had lost. Or maybe he had been staring at nothing, maybe he had been thinking nothing except this:

She knows.

My wife knows.

But it was a new world already in that car, with Fat Phil checking me in the rear-view mirror and me trying very hard not to cry, and Mary gone, and our business with her, and now Christian, the love of my life, revealed to be not much more than just another guy, mounting the first young woman who looked at him wide-eyed and promised to restore his battered self-esteem in her shared flat, or maybe he just wanted a little sugar in his bowl, or maybe he wanted to even the score between us, or maybe it was a bit of all of the above, and it was all so sad that I could not speak, there were no words, because apart from everything else, I knew I had lost my best friend in this new world.

How much we throw away, I thought. How much we waste. And I wept when we were home and our front door closed behind us and Marlon scooted off to his room, desperate to get out of his funeral kit, I wept because I knew that Christian and I were doing something to our son that would change him forever. Marlon had always been a happy, easy kid, a bit quiet, unsuited to the rough-and-tumble of even the softest play areas – he had a particular terror of bouncy castles. Every film upset him – Happy Feet was a horror story to Marlon, because a small penguin gets bullied by bigger birds. He was a gentle soul. And I did not want him to change. And I knew he would. Infidelity – what we had done to each other – was nothing compared to what we were going to do to our son.

I watched the field. I found I liked watching the field more and more. The field never changed. Not like everything else. The field looked exactly like that when I was growing up. And I remembered – after I knew what he had done, and after we realised that we were falling apart and nothing would ever put us back together again – Christian and I crying in perfect harmony.

‘I’m sorry!’

‘Me too!’

And then we would cry some more because, in the end, we could never be quite sorry enough, we would never be so sorry that everything was as it was before. There are lines that we cross, I saw now, lines that mean you can never find your way home again. We had crossed those lines, my husband and I, and we wept for our home, for our boy, for each other, for ourselves, and for all we would never have again. You can talk about it for the rest of the night or the rest of your life. But once you cross the line, there’s no way home.