‘You might be able to talk Shaun round to believing your twisted little fantasies, but don’t try it with me, because I’m telling you now, it won’t wash.’

I shrink away from Joanne’s wild eyes and bared teeth as she leans across her desk after asking me to pop up to see her. I glance across at Anya’s office, but she’s not there. Joanne’s far too clever to show her true colours when there’s anyone else around.

‘What are you talking about?’ I bite my lip in an effort to stop my eyes stinging. ‘How would you feel if your daughter was made to feel inferior like that?’

She seems to catch herself acting aggressively and sits back, takes a breath.

‘I appreciate you must be worried about Maisie’s weight. We’ve all noticed it. But what you can’t do is blame other people for it.’

I’d swear this woman is a completely different person to the one I’ve worked with. She’s always seemed so calm and rational… so together. I wonder if Shaun has seen this other side to her.

Granted, I embarrassed her at the dance school, but I didn’t expect this at work. She must’ve been saving it up.

‘Look, Emma, I don’t know what’s happening in your head. If I’m perfectly honest, I don’t care. A few weeks ago, you gave us your blessing, and now it seems you’re hell-bent on trying to cause trouble for us.’

‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘But I’ll not sit back and let Maisie be pushed into the shadows.’

Joanne laughs. ‘She manages that all on her own. I hear Piper asking all the time if she wants to watch something on TV or play a computer game in her bedroom. If you want the awful truth, your daughter is jealous of mine. She’s jealous of how she looks, what she has, and she’s jealous because Shaun and Piper get on so well.’

Fury whirls around my chest like a cyclone. I stand up and bang the desk with the flat of my hand.

‘Just so long as you and Piper both remember that Shaun is Maisie’s father, and legally, right now he’s still my husband. So just be careful if you think you’ve got your feet firmly and permanently under the fucking table, Little Miss Perfect.’

And with that, even though it’s only mid morning, I stalk from her office, down the stairs and out of the building.

I jump into my car and drive to a small park quite close to home but off the beaten track.

I park up on the rough gravel at the entrance but I don’t get out. It’s cold, and I came away without my jacket, so I leave the engine running and the heater blasting.

There’s nobody else here at all and the isolation is just what I need to wind down after the unpleasant altercation with Joanne.

The three of us used to come here when Maisie was small. There are a few pieces of play equipment in the fenced-off children’s area where Shaun and I used to sit on a bench while Maisie ran around and let off some steam.

We’d often talk about the future, about when Maisie was older, what we’d be doing, where we’d be working. It was all unknown at that point; the only thing we were certain of was that we’d be together.

Joanne has probably already been on the phone ensuring Shaun knows her side of what happened, what was said. Everything carefully constructed to frame me as the unreasonable, desperate ex-wife.

But who have I got to rant to? My mother, and that’s about it. And that’s not going to happen because I know she still holds me accountable for Shaun and me splitting up in the first place.

Never mind. It’s quiet thinking time I need right now, because something is bothering me that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something that would be really hard to explain to anyone else.

Joanne seems to me like a person without a past. I know that sounds really weird, but it’s as near as I can get to the feeling that everything she does, everything she says, is an act. And that nobody really knows the person who is underneath it all.

I’ve asked Shaun a couple of innocuous questions over the past few weeks, just the usual: how long was she married before, where is she from.

And he doesn’t know the answers. I know my husband well enough to spot when he’s being evasive or just doesn’t want to discuss his new life with me. I’m pretty certain that’s not what is behind his shoulder shrug every time I raise a question about Joanne’s past.

He really doesn’t know.

‘Maybe you should ask her a bit about her background,’ I suggested to him recently. ‘Show some interest.’

‘Joanne is a big believer in drawing a line under what’s gone before,’ he said easily. ‘Piper’s father died in a tragedy too bad to speak of, that’s all I know. They don’t talk about him now because Piper was too young to remember much about him and Joanne doesn’t like to bring up what happened.’

A perfectly reasonable answer, some might think. And Shaun himself seems satisfied with it.

But as a mother myself, I find it a little odd.

Most women I know, if they lost their husband and the father of their only child, would keep his memory alive for the child’s sake at least. So that they were aware of where they came from.

Unless she had something to hide, that is.