I love you is an enormous thing to be told.

It is also, offered at twenty to eleven in the morning by a man whose wife has spent four and a half hours ringing a telephone he was looking at, an answer to a question nobody had asked.

Nobody had ever doubted that Kevin loved me.

Not me, not my mother, not Brian, not the tired doctor, not Pilar, and not even Kevin’s mother, who had built her entire operation on the strength of it.

Love had never been the thing in short supply in my marriage.