My husband left his medication at home, so I stopped by his office to bring it to him. But when I asked the receptionist to call him downstairs, she said, "Ma'am, your husband has been on leave for the past week."

It was the worst twenty-four hours of my adult life, and about four people have told me they would have done exactly the same, and they would have.

But my husband was not hiding an affair.

He was hiding a waiting room. Eleven chairs and a water machine, forty minutes across town, every Thursday since June.

And he was not hiding it because he is secretive. He is the least secretive man I have ever met.

He was hiding it because he had watched me, for fourteen months, from the passenger seat of a car in a hospital car park — and he had worked out something about his own wife that I had never once allowed myself to work out.

That I do not go in.

Four words, and he had never said them to me, and he had been carrying them since about the September of four years ago.