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.

You always knew it didn’t mean anything.

And I said: yes. That’s the problem.

She did not understand and I do not think she has understood since, and I have stopped trying to explain it, which took me about a year.

Because the flirting was not an accident, or a personality, or too much prosecco. It was a two-year piece of work, done deliberately, using my marriage as cover for a relationship with her own brother-in-law.

She used me as scenery.

She came back twice more that summer and then stopped. She rings our mother. She sends the children birthday money, which I have not sent back, because that is between her and them.

She is thirty-four and she lives in a flat in Calderwick and she is, by all accounts, with Gethin, which surprised everybody including me.

And Kirsten Vale, who I rang in the August of 2025, nine years late.