I got on a plane to my mother’s hospital and my husband was eleven rows in front of me with my best friend. There was a note of hers in my handbag that she’d written on my fridge that morning.

Every trip since the January of 2024 and where he said he was. Thirty-one of them.

Every time Saskia had been vague about a weekend. Six that I could be sure of.

And then the other column, which took until about half three, which is every single time in eighteen months that one of them had covered for the other without me noticing it was a cover.

There are fourteen in that column.

The worst one is from the September. Corin was in Ardmere City and Saskia rang me from a car and said she was on her way back from her sister’s and did I want anything from the big Tesco.

She did that while she was in a car with my husband. To make a call land in the right place.

I sat on a bed at one in the morning and understood that these two people had been running something that required planning, and that planning means thinking about me — and that for eighteen months, several times a week, both of them had been thinking about me carefully.