My mother-in-law brought thirty-eight friends into my restaurant, ordered the most expensive menu on it, and told them she was paying. Then she started boasting about my husband’s new girlfriend — and I looked across the room at the young woman refilling their water.

A card on my account, with a monthly limit, for fish and vegetables.

Over the last fourteen months, eleven thousand dollars of it went on things that were not fish.

A hotel in Linmouth, four times. A jeweller on Carrick Street, twice. Two dinners at a restaurant I would not be seen dead in. And, from the May, a regular transfer of three hundred dollars a month to a personal account that my bank could not identify.

I was going to confront him with it in the September.

Then Constance leaned across a table of thirty-eight women with my bottle in her hand and told them it all came out of this place.