And one was my hairdresser, who had done Chloe Bennett’s hair twice and who had worked it out and who has told me since, in some distress, that she thought about it every appointment for nine months and could not find a way to say it.

I want to write about those nine people carefully, because the obvious position is available and I held it for about five months and it was corrosive and it was also, I now think, wrong.

The obvious position is that they owed me the truth.

What I have landed on instead — and I want to be clear that this is where I got to, not where I started, and that I still have a bad hour about it perhaps twice a year — is this.

Telling a woman that her husband is having an affair is an act that costs the teller everything and helps the told almost not at all in the short term, and everybody knows that, and so essentially nobody does it, and the people who do not do it are not monsters.