My father, Jonathan says, is a womanising bastard. I love him but it’s true, he’s a bastard. He doesn’t see it that way, he says he loves easily and well, but he’s a serial cheater. He cheated on my mother, he cheated on my stepmother, he cheated on his first wife, and he invented a whole intellectual framework to justify it. He’s slept with his students his whole career. He’s completely unethical.

I let this sink in. But I’m not sure that what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is unethical. My instinct is that it isn’t. That something about living ethically together is bound up in not judging our desires, or controlling and punishing them. But maybe that’s just me justifying it.

So you think it has to be justified.

I’m not sure. Do you?

I’m not sure either.

Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love. I get out my phone and look up the etymology. See? it’s an Old French word, that has to do with a lack of faith. But I have so much faith. I am full of faith.