The extraordinary particulars of Annie Kilner and Kyle Walker’s divorce

On Wednesday night, as the news broke that Annie Kilner had filed for divorce from her footballer husband Kyle Walker, the couple were to be found spending a quiet night in together at the family home in Cheshire, watching TV and sharing a sofa.

A surprise maybe – but from that you may gather their relationship and its status is a little more complicated than it seems.

The pair, who were sweethearts as teenagers, have been married since 2021 and have four children. And although Annie has kicked him out numerous times, most recently in January this year after finding that he had fathered a second child by influencer Lauryn Goodman, they remain a couple – for now.

‘They are continuing to work on the marriage,’ says a Cheshire-based source. ‘The idea of a divorce has been parked for now. She has filed for divorce that is true, but it is not an active plan.

‘It’s possible that she won’t be able to get past the betrayal, and then they will end up splitting – but they are not there yet.’

The source adds: ‘Things are difficult but no final decision has been made as their number-one desire is the happiness of their children. Their history together factors into it as well.’

The full truth of their shaky reunion, Annie’s demands for a settlement and Kyle’s efforts to keep his family together is an extraordinary one.

A well-placed local friend this week told me that one of the options being considered is a ‘no-split divorce’.

In that eventuality, the pair would formally end the marriage, with Kyle giving millions from his £27million fortune to Annie, but they would continue to live together as man and wife and co-parent.

The thinking goes that this way Annie would get the financial security which she insists she needs in order to carry on with the relationship, and Kyle would get to live with the woman he insists he doesn’t want to give up.

That’s a head-spinning possibility indeed, but in this most toxic WAG saga, it seems anything, no matter how bonkers, is possible.

Kyle has been living in the marital home since last month. He and Annie were reconciled after spending time as a family at a resort in Turkey with the children, followed by a beachside break in Wales over the summer.

Friends said that the couple were trying to figure out their future from a position of togetherness.

What we now know is that at some point late in the summer Annie saw a lawyer and filed for divorce.

I’m told she was humiliated by Lauryn’s antics during the Euros in the summer, where she took her son by Kyle, Kairo, to an England match wearing a shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Daddy’, and also reportedly dismayed after finding out just how much money Lauryn had wrung out of Kyle when his maintenance arrangements came to court in July.

After the Euros – which Annie attended with her four sons –Roman, 11, Riaan, seven, Reign, five, and Rezon, six months – came a court case over maintenance arrangements for Goodman’s children with Walker, son Kairo, four, and daughter Kinara, 13 months.

The judge found overwhelmingly in his favour and accused Ms Goodman of treating the footballer like an ‘open ended chequebook’ and of repeatedly threatening him to get what she wanted.

In his ruling, Judge Edward Hess dismissed many of Goodman’s demands, concluding that she was ‘not reliable’ while claiming Walker ‘acted with dignity and generosity’.

Her demands included that Walker paid for the upkeep of a hydro-pool, a £28-per-hour gardener, a car worth up to £70,000 every three years and air-conditioning costing around £33,000. Dismissing Goodman’s claim for air-conditioning, the judge said she could mitigate high temperatures in her home by ‘deploying a modestly-priced electric fan’.

She had asked for £32,000 to lay AstroTurf in the £2.4 million home he had bought for her to live in in Sussex. In court, Lauryn justified the need for the artificial turf pitch by stating that daughter Kinara kicked a ball from a crawling position, which could make her a future England footballer.

The court heard that Walker accepted some of Goodman’s demands, but felt others were disproportionate, with his lawyers claiming that she was making a ‘blatant attempt to leverage’ money for ‘personal benefit’.

Walker was ordered to pay £12,500 per month in child maintenance – a figure he offered before the hearing began. He was also ordered to pay £30,000 for a car to be used by a nanny and other fees.

A friend says: ‘Annie went to see a divorce lawyer in late summer and filed for divorce then. She was angry – she gets angry and she fires shots.

‘But after family holidays over the summer the decision was taken for him to move back into the house and for them all to try to get past his betrayals. That’s where they are now. The truth is that they want to stay together but they don’t know if they can manage it.’

The friend adds that the Walkers are mulling a number of options. ‘Annie wants security so she has been exploring options for financial security. Obviously the trust has gone in the marriage.

‘It might be that she gets a lump-sum divorce settlement, or it might be that she gets some kind of other formal arrangement where she gets a certain amount of money every month from Kyle.

‘Annie wants that to be put in place. That’s all being worked out and looked at and there isn’t an agreement yet. It doesn’t mean that they are splitting up as the finances are separate to what is going on in the relationship.

‘It could be that they decide that the simplest option is for them to go through a divorce which would settle it all but they could still stay together. They have a lot of feelings for each other and neither wants the other party to walk away or start afresh with a new partner.’

The painful marital situation in which Kyle Walker finds himself has, of course, been made many times trickier by the behaviour of Lauryn Goodman, who has seemingly wrung every excruciating drop out of the saga.

Sources close to the Walkers say their efforts to reconcile have been made ‘very much more difficult because of Lauryn. She has been relentless’.

As I’ve previously revealed, the Walkers have had their legal teams monitor Lauryn’s activity, with a view to potentially launching a lawsuit for harassment against her in due course.

Some of Lauryn’s associates believe that her ultimate aim is to get back together with the Manchester City and England defender. It was said this week that she ‘will be wanting to throw a party’ to celebrate him becoming single.

She might want to pack away her bunting for now.