He came home at seven to a house with the lights on and nobody in it except a note on the kitchen island. The children were at his mother’s, all six, because I had rung her at noon and she had driven ninety minutes without asking a single question. The note said I had gone to have some fun and would be back Tuesday, and that the fridge was stocked and the school run started at eight.

I went to a motel forty minutes away with a bag and a library book. That was the whole of it. I slept eleven hours the first night. I ate a meal sitting down. I had a shower that lasted as long as I wanted it to last.

What I did not expect was the phone call on Sunday evening. Not from him. From his mother, Rosalind, who told me she had watched her own husband do exactly this and had spent thirty years telling herself it was ordinary, and that she had said so to her son on Saturday afternoon in her own kitchen with all six children in the next room.

He did not manage it. That is not a triumph, it is just what happened. He rang me eight times on Monday and I answered the fourth, and he did not shout. He asked how his mother did the mornings.

We are twenty months into something now. He works the same job and leaves it at six. He does bedtime four nights. The golf clubs are in the garage and he plays about once a month and asks first, which he had never once done in eleven years. We did counselling for a year and there were two months in there I genuinely thought we were finished.

I go out on Thursdays. Choir, of all things. I am not good and I do not care.

Rosalind takes the little ones on Sundays and she and I speak more than she and her son do.

He told me I was no fun anymore, and he was right, and what he never worked out was that the fun had not gone anywhere. It had simply been spent, every single day, on him and on the six people we made together. I stopped waiting for somebody to notice what I was carrying and set it down instead, and the moment I did, everyone in that house finally saw the weight of it.