I went to surprise my husband at the hospital with his lunch.

And I tucked a note under the fork.

You don’t have to look after everybody. Let me have a turn.

I want to be honest about that lunch before I go any further, because it comes back later.

It was not only kindness.

I had been building a case for eleven months. I had the conversation written. I knew the order and I knew which line I was going to end on, and I had rehearsed it in the car about nine times.

And part of me wanted to stand in that corridor and actually see him being the man he kept telling me he was.

So that I could either forgive him properly, or finally be allowed to be angry.

I drove over imagining his

face.

And the second I walked through those doors, something was wrong.

At the nurses’ station there was a woman I have known for six years — I went to her daughter’s christening — and she stopped smiling the moment she saw me.

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