The radio in Helen’s Vauxhall had been off for about four years. She couldn’t tell you the date she stopped switching it on, because nobody decides a thing like that. It just becomes the way the car is. Quiet on the way to the surgery in Chester where she works on reception. Quiet outside the big Tesco on Sealand Road, where she sometimes sat for ten minutes longer than she needed to, not thinking about anything in particular. Just not going home yet.
If you’d asked her about the silence, she’d have said she preferred it. That’s the answer she’d have given, and she’d have half believed it too.
Helen is 51, and she’s been married for twenty-three years. Her husband isn’t unkind — she’s always quick to say that, as though someone’s about to accuse him of something. He works hard. He remembers the MOT. But somewhere along the way their conversations narrowed to a kind of household admin: whose turn for the tip run, what time the boiler man was coming, whether her mother needed picking up on Sunday. He hadn’t asked her a question that wasn’t logistical in years. And she’d stopped expecting him to, which she now thinks was the bigger problem.
She found Illicit Encounters in February, the way a lot of women do — late, on her phone, after a third glass of wine and an evening of being talked past. She didn’t sign up that night. She closed the tab, slightly scandalised at herself, and then opened it again four days later in her lunch hour. “I told myself I was just looking,” she says. “Everyone tells themselves that.”
Daniel was the fourth man she spoke to. Fifty-four, an engineer from the Wirral, married even longer than she had been. Their messages weren’t dramatic. They were funny, mostly — long and rambling, the kind you compose a little in your head beforehand. After three weeks they met for coffee in Knutsford, far enough from both their lives, and talked for two hours that felt like twenty minutes.
It was on the second coffee that he mentioned the song. Some jazz record he’d been going on about — she’d never heard of it and said so. That evening a link arrived on her phone: “This is the one I meant. Listen for the trumpet at 2:40. That’s the bit.” She sat in the car on her own drive, engine off, and played it the whole way through. Then she played it again.
She can’t fully explain what happened next, except that the radio went back on. Not for any reason she could name. She just reached over one morning on the A55 and switched it on, the way she used to. Within a fortnight she was singing along — quietly at first, then not.
Her daughter noticed inside a week. Nineteen, home from uni for the holidays, sitting in the passenger seat with that expression only teenagers can produce. “Since when do you sing in the car?” Helen laughed it off — new station, good mood, mind your own business. But the question stayed with her, because of who hadn’t asked it. Her husband had been in that car a dozen times since the radio came back on. He hadn’t said a word. She’s still not sure he ever registered the silence, which means he can’t have registered the end of it either.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you about affairs, the part that surprises members more than anything else: the first things to come back are small. Not passion, not drama, none of the things films promise. Music. Appetite. Bothering with the good perfume on a Tuesday. Walking slightly faster. The affair didn’t make Helen a different woman. It reminded her of one she’d quietly filed away.
Where it goes from here, she honestly doesn’t know. She and Daniel meet every couple of weeks — coffee, sometimes lunch, once a long afternoon in Liverpool that neither of them has stopped mentioning. She isn’t leaving her marriage. She’s clear on that, and so is he. The songs keep arriving, though. She keeps them in a playlist on her phone, named something deliberately boring so nobody ever taps on it. Thirty-one songs now. She knows every one.
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