For four years my husband’s family called me the walking credit card and ordered lobster every time I was at the table. At my father-in-law’s birthday dinner I smiled, let all nineteen of them order, and then a waiter came out carrying a tray of nineteen separate checks.

sitting next to me doing the small apologetic face.

We are still married. We did eight months of counselling and he is not the same about his family and it cost him a great deal to get there.

There have been eleven family dinners since. Everybody pays for themselves now, every time, and it was never discussed once. It simply started happening.

The restaurants have changed. Nobody has suggested The Lantern House again.

Briar and I are, unexpectedly, all right. She rang me in the February, about four months after, and did not apologise and instead asked me whether I knew anybody in operations, and I did, and she has been working since the May.

She said one thing on that call that I have kept.

She said, “You were the only one at that table who was actually looking at the prices.”

You don’t need to look at the