He had called his mother to come and collect him, to give him a way out of the long hard night, an exit from the emergency room where his sick child sat waiting for a doctor.

He had arranged his own escape and let me sit there believing he was fetching us help.

That was the detail that cut deepest, the small extra cruelty folded inside the large one.

It was not only that he wanted to leave.

It was that he had gone outside and made his arrangements in secret and then come back and said nothing, let me go on rocking our daughter and assuming, in whatever corner of my mind was tracking him, that he was on our side of this.

He had let me keep believing in him for twenty extra minutes that he had already privately decided not to earn.