I went to surprise my husband at the hospital with his lunch. His colleague looked at me with tears in his eyes and said: “He hasn’t told you anything, has he?”

that either. I found the shift rota afterwards and worked it out with a calendar.

So the same man was both of those things at once, on the same Saturday, and I have had to learn to hold that without one of them cancelling the other.

It has been seven months.

He is back. Not there — somewhere else, forty minutes away, on a lower band, and he has never once complained about that in my hearing.

We did eleven weeks with a woman on Wednesdays and we are doing more.

The hardest single conversation was not about the lie. It was about the badge.

Because he clipped it to his pocket every morning in front of me, and I asked him about that, and he said: I couldn’t work out how to walk out of the house without it.

Cassian resigned in the June. I did not ask him to