“How dare you?” Al looks up from the Saturday paper. He is so calm and smooth a personality, so rarely angry, that for a second I don’t realize he is serious and mistake his tone for ironic awe.

“You like it?” I ask but before I have even finished the words I know I’ve got it wrong. It was a risky play; I wanted to woo Stanek and Jonathan and The Telegram readers; I was convinced by my own cleverness and conveniently ignored where I got my clever idea. Al quickly slaps me down.

“I think it’s appallingly presumptuous.”

“But you all complained it was just about Ellen Ternan. I decided to let Dickens get a word in,” I say, but it now sounds unconvincing even to my own ears.

“I’ll leave others to judge your talent for pastiche. It’s the story he tells…”

“ ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale.’ ”

“It’s one thing to do Dickens. You studied him before you quit; he’s still one of the most popular writers in the language. I can’t pretend to own him, although I do think you are treading in pretty well-worn territory here…”

“But you own The Thousand and One Nights? Is that it?” I sound angry.

“No, but I am the leading, the only, scholar who has really traced the influence of The Nights on Dickens.” Al’s assessment of his scholarship is perfectly accurate, but when he puffs himself up like this I always remember my mother saying in her acerbic way, “If you are really good, you don’t need to boast.”

“That’s my stuff,” Al continues. “You’re stealing from me.”

Part of me knows he’s right and that I should acknowledge it now and make peace, but intellectual sparring comes far more easily to both of us. “Come on. I may be using your research as a jumping-off point but you didn’t just stay up to midnight two nights in a row trying to write a retelling of ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale’ in the style of The Pickwick Papers.”

“Oh, is that what you were doing? Well, the point you are making is mine.”

“So, your work inspires me. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Flattery, this is where I should have started, before publication. Last week, after my six-month checkup. I got the all-clear. Al and I went out to dinner to celebrate; he smiled at me in his old way. Things were looking good and now I’ve blown it.

“You’ve got your bestsellers, for Christ’s sake. That’s your turf. Why do you have to come poaching on mine?”

My anger, tamped down to get by, returns to me in full force. “You are always sneering at my books. You think they’re just romance novels. And here, when I’m doing something more literary…” Lost in my own sense of grievance now, I’m surprised when he comes right back at me: “This is so like you. It’s always about the needs of your story, never mine.”

Al has hit at the heart of something there. I stumble towards the table where he sits and grope for a chair, collapsing into it. He starts up towards me, anxiety instantly subduing him.

“Are you okay?” He touches my back. “You’re not well enough to be working yet. I hate to see you exhausting yourself.”

His concern somehow infuriates me more; I am tired of his pity and worry; they are no replacement for passion.

“That’s not true. You just hate to see me working.”

“What are you yelling about, Mummy?”

Anahita has come into the kitchen. She sounds more inquisitive than alarmed, but she has heard us. We are trying so hard to give the girls stability after all that has happened, to let them trust in their home and their parents again.

“Oh, nothing, sweetie. Daddy and I were just arguing about Dickens.”

“Charles Chickens,” Anahita replies. “Stupid old Charles Chickens. Can I have some hot chocolate?”

She is easily distracted by the prospect of her hot drink, but as I stick the mug in the microwave I am fighting back tears. Al grabs his tablet off the kitchen table and removes himself upstairs to his office, shutting the door behind him. He doesn’t come out until lunch, which he eats in silence before preparing to depart with the girls for a birthday party. I dress them up in their new velveteen pants and frilly blouses, press colourfully wrapped packages for the birthday girl into their hands, shut the door and start to cry. I had wanted Al to like the serial, to understand that writing was part of getting better. I wanted to be somebody other than a patient; I wanted to be me, the old me he used to love. In my convenient fantasy, the serial was going to draw us together again, revive our mutual interest in literature, make daily life about something more than getting by without a fight. But with “The Second Dervish’s Tale” I had only got his attention by treading on his toes. I had misjudged my audience again.

I want to phone Becky, seek solace and rehash the rights and wrongs of the situation, but I know she won’t welcome the call. Becky does casseroles, she does babysitting, she does hand-holding, but she has made it very clear that she doesn’t do marriage counselling any more.

—

It was a breach in our friendship that happened before Al returned to the house. I was well launched into one of my regular phone calls with Becky, asking for the umpteenth time how anyone who had so wanted children would jeopardize his relationship with his precious daughters by betraying their mother and gambling that some babe twenty years his junior was going to stick by him beyond next year when Becky said something that brought me up short.

“I guess he wasn’t happy.”

“What do you mean? How could he not be happy? He had everything he said he wanted, me, the house, the girls, the big job. A week before he told me about the affair, we had been talking about finally making a trip to Iran.”

“Just because people have the things they want doesn’t mean they are happy. Maybe he wasn’t happy with you. People drift apart sometimes.”

“We had a date night every week. We still had sex.”

“It’s not really about sex. It’s about being connected or something. We’re all so busy, you know, with the kids and work. Maybe something got lost in the shuffle. Anyway, he seems to have found something he was missing.”

“Oh, he has, has he?”

I was angry again, angry at Al, angry at Becky, although I knew what she was saying was half true. At least after the girls were born. We had made the unspoken, incremental pact of parents with young children: we will love each other a little less so that we can love them more. Love is only infinite in stories; in real life, there are only so many hours in the day.

“Do you really believe that?” I continued haughtily.

“Well, I think there are two sides to—”

“And which one are you on?”

“I don’t want to take sides, Sharon. David and I want to remain friends with both of you. I don’t want to do he said, she said.”

“Great. Thanks. Okay. What do you want to talk about then?”

“What did we used to talk about? Our jobs. The kids. Our mothers.”

“Our husbands.”

“Yeah, but, I don’t know, the environment. Municipal politics. The ballet. We used to talk about lots of stuff and now all we ever talk about is Al and the blessed student.”

“Yeah.”

“So let’s just try talking about something else, okay?”

“Nice weather we’ve been having lately.”

The next time I called her it was to tell her that I had cancer.