I go downstairs to my bedroom and get out my diary from where I’ve hidden it in the wardrobe under my jumpers. I write, ‘My mother has a secret.

It’s as if we’ve stepped into a Constable painting, a bucolic vision of England. There’s a single oak ahead of us in the heart of the valley; the grass is lime-green and the steep sides of the Cotswold escarpment are covered in dense woodland.

I wonder if that is what he really feels; if he’s accidentally hit on the words that will set off small explosions in my mind – trigger- phrases like risk and safety, danger and security, love and loss, and the other ones, the ones that I never say.

His eyes, staring out at her from the photograph, looked – she searched for another word to describe them and failed – he looked evil. There was a blankness to him, as if the normal human emotions that you took for granted in everyone you met had been excised. It was the kind of stare you might see in a wolf or a shark; a creature who did not care how kind you were, what your story was, the dreams you had for your child.

I walk over to see what it is: it’s a paperweight with a dandelion clock perfectly preserved inside. I hold it in my hand. It’s smooth and heavy. It would be just right for my husband. I can imagine it sitting on his desk: a single, solitary objet d’art in the midst of that smooth expanse of wood. As I pay for it, I start to blush, a blush that grows stronger and deeper, flaring over my chest and making my ears burn. I’m buying a present for my husband while I’m with my lover.

I doubt you are a martyr, but should you decide to risk your own life, I can assure you that, as well as killing you, I will hunt down your family and I will kill them, and then I will find your friends and I will kill them too.

She realized that she no longer believed her husband: it was as if the certainty that he’d betrayed her had settled into her bones like the chill of a damp day.