My sister kissed my husband in front of thirty people at her own anniversary party and called it a joke. Her husband had a wrapped present in his hands and an envelope she had never opened.

Two years of a pretty woman of thirty-three telling a forty-year-old man in front of his wife that she wished she had one like him.

He said he never encouraged it. That is true and it is not the point, and to his credit he said so himself before I did.

He said: “I didn’t do anything, Iona. I just didn’t do anything. For two years.”

And then he said the sentence that is the reason we spent nine months apart.

“And if I’d said something on the ninth of April, it would have all come out — and then there’d have been a conversation about why she’d been doing it to me for two years, in front of everybody, and nobody stopped her. Including me.”

He kept quiet about an affair to avoid being asked why he liked being flirted with.

Not to protect her. Not even, really, to protect himself from me.