I called his office on the Monday to arrange to send it back, and the woman on reception said he’d stepped out and would I like to leave a message, and then she said — and she was being friendly, she was making conversation — she said, ‘His wife just dropped off his lunch, so he can’t be far.'”

She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn.

“That’s how I found out.

A receptionist being nice.”

She found out she was pregnant five weeks later.

She called him.

She got about eleven words in — she had not even said the word pregnant — and he cut across her and said that the night in Phoenix had been a mistake, that he loved his wife very much, and that she should not contact him again.

“And I sat there with a phone in my hand,” Valerie said, “and I thought: I am not going to spend the next eighteen years chasing a man who lies like that.