Five mornings. Five.
He had got dressed. He had taken the laptop bag. He had kissed me and left at the same time he leaves.
And every single one of those five evenings, that man had come home and talked about his day.
About meetings. About a man called Pryor who is apparently impossible and who I have been hearing about for two years.
About the traffic on the Harlow road, which is a real thing and which is genuinely terrible.
He had not been at work for any of it.
Eleven years married. Thirteen together.
I am forty-one. He is forty-three.
I have never gone through that man's phone. Not once.
I have never checked a receipt. Never rung anywhere to see where he was.
Thirteen years, and I have never once had a reason to — and I used to say that out loud to people as though it were something I had earned.
