If I’d known it would be the last ever gift I would give my husband, I’d have chosen something better. It was March 2020, and on the day of his birthday, I was in Istanbul for a work trip, giving a talk at a conference and exploring the city. It was my last excursion before the pandemic lockdown, and looking back now, it seems like another world, where people still hugged each other freely and shared bites of food from each other’s plates.

He never had enough pens for work (he was an academic), so I bought him one from a little independent stationery shop. I can’t pretend it was an imaginative choice, let alone a lavish one. Although the pen was gilt-edged and shiny, it was a rollerball.

The men in the shop seemed surprised that I didn’t haggle, but I felt that the price was proof of my love for my husband. It wrote smoothly and had a good weight in my hand. I stepped out of the shop, bathed in the beautiful haze of Istanbul, and couldn’t wait to fly home and give it to him.

After more than 25 years and three children together, it was sometimes hard to think of gifts that wouldn’t become yet more clutter. Yet the urge—or the duty—was still alive. His was the face I thought of when I ate my breakfasts of olives and salty sheep cheese with a view of the Bosphorus. “Miss you!” I texted him, telling him about the extraordinary market I had just visited.

Three months later, we were sitting on a park bench in Cambridge when he told me he didn’t love me anymore, “not like that.” He added that he hadn’t done so for “three years, maybe four.” He never explained what “like that” meant. The phrase tormented me. If he didn’t love me, why had he said that he did, so many times, in so many different ways? And why was he now trying to kiss me, right here on this park bench? Only a week earlier, he had walked into the garden and said how beautiful my hair looked in the light. I was stunned and confused. The day had started like any other, with him bringing me a cup of tea in bed. Although we both worked too hard, we still shared a life and a bed. It would be another couple of months before he dropped off the letter telling me about the new person he had fallen in love with.