The Ghosts of Christmas Present

It was the same old story. Reason. Excuse. Lie.  He was working late, and I didn’t need to wait up. I pretended to be upset because it was the third evening in a row he’d promised to stay with the children while I worked on my book. The children, of course, were no problem at all; I’d move my laptop top the kitchen table to be near them. I gave them glue, old magazines, blunt-tip scissors, coloured paper, and plastic crayons. They felt proud to be ‘making a book’ like mummy. I had promised them that when they reached a hundred pages each (no slapdash work or the promise would not count) I would take them to the copy shop for binding. I meant to keep this promise, since I wanted something, anything, to remind me of this dire period in my life. I have contacts. Moles. Plants. Spies. Truth to tell, I could almost tell what he was going to do before he himself did.  It wasn’t even the buy-her-chocolates-and-flowers-when-you-are-guilty-of-something attitude that gave him away. He was so predictable. Anyway, I’d had him tailed by two private detectives. It would have been so much easier for me to accept that he was two-timing me with a woman; that he wanted me out of the way, by hook or...