Verity told me all of this, in a service station car park outside Lindhaven, on the twenty-third of October, five days after my wedding, over two cups of tea and a packet of biscuits neither of us opened.
And the two things I asked her in that car park, which were not the questions I had driven there with.
I had driven there with about nine questions, and every one of them was really the same question, which was did you sleep with my husband.
And I sat down opposite her and she pushed a cup of tea across and I heard myself say: "How long has she been in there?"
Six years. Since the November of 2019.
And then: "Does she like it?"
Which is a stupid thing to ask about a specialist unit and which is the only question I have ever asked that made Verity Cobb's face move.
