Not: has something happened at work.
Not: is he all right.
It did not cross my mind. In eleven months and eleven minutes it did not once cross my mind that the thing wrong with my husband might be about his job, because in my version of him the job was the thing that was going right.
And Winnie said — and she was being lovely, she was not having a go — "We all thought you were asking us to say it for him."
They thought I knew and was giving them permission.
What I did not notice.
And here is where it stops being a story about a man who lied to me.
Eleven months.
He was out of the house by half past seven every day and back at about eight at night, and there are eleven months of that, and I did not know for one single day of it.
