I had not confronted him because part of me had been waiting to be sure — sure of what he was, sure of what I would do about it — and because another part of me, the part six years of erasure had worn down, had not yet found the strength to blow up a life, even a life that was hurting me.
But seeing Carys Renton standing behind my husband’s hospital bed in her expensive coat, present at his collapse, made everything I had been uncertain about suddenly certain.
And more than that: the clinician in me, the part that never sleeps, looked at her standing there and felt the second wave of unease, sharper than the first.
Because a mistress does not usually accompany the man to the hospital and stand at his bedside in front of his wife and his parents.
That takes either a recklessness born of panic, or a specific need to be present — to see how it played out, to manage it.
Her being in that corridor at all was itself a piece of data, and it was not the data of an innocent woman.