He came home at seven to a house with the lights on and nobody in it except a note on the kitchen island. The children were at his mother’s, all six, because I had rung her at noon and she had driven ninety minutes without asking a single question. The note said I had gone to have some fun and would be back Tuesday, and that the fridge was stocked and the school run started at eight.

I went to a motel forty minutes away with a bag and a library book. That was the whole of it. I slept eleven hours the first night. I ate a meal sitting down. I had a shower that lasted as long as I wanted it to last.

What I did not expect was the phone call on Sunday evening. Not from him. From his mother, Rosalind, who told me she had watched her own husband do exactly this and had spent thirty years telling herself it was ordinary, and that she had said so to her son on Saturday afternoon in her own kitchen with all six children in the next room.