‘I can’t do this weekend,’ she said, pausing. ‘I’m sorry. Look, I know I’ve been really distracted recently, there’s just been so much going on at work and I—’

‘It’s fine,’ he said, picking up his coat and walking towards the door. ‘I’m going for a drink. I’ll see you later.’

Over the next few days with Tom and the kids away, a stillness settled through the house. Without the constant jangle of family life, of slammed doors, suffocating silences, the constant demands for attention that were never met, the house rang with questions Gabriela struggled to answer. The main one was devastatingly simple: how long did she think she could carry on with this?

While she could hardly believe the house was really under watch from within, still she found herself rushing from one room to the next, haunted by the sense that she was being chased. As though running from a future that was inevitable as the grave.

By the time Tom and the kids returned on the Sunday, she was desperate to see them.

‘Gabriela?’

She heard the shaking of keys and then Tom’s voice through the front door as she lay upstairs on the bed with a book, trying to escape her own head. Leaping up, she walked quickly to the hall and down the stairs to where Tom was standing, a suitcase still in his right hand, the other hand propping open the front door.

‘Hey, love.’ He kissed her on the cheek and pulled her into a hug before turning to indicate their children, comatose in the back of the car.

‘When was the last time that happened?’ he said, and she struggled to remember. They would be six and four this year – so far from being babies, and yet where had that time gone? The thought struck her briefly as heartbreaking.

‘How was the journey?’

‘Oh, you know, deeply glamorous. Matilda and The BFG on loop, outbreaks of war from the back seat, occasional retching.’

‘I missed you,’ she said.

‘If you hold the front door, I’ll bring them in one at a time,’ he replied before stopping and turning to her, kissing her on the mouth. ‘I’ve missed you too.’

Lying awake one night, a few days later, she decided to tell him everything – to clear the air of all the lies swelling between them, the duplicity as destructive to her family as any threat Emsworth had mustered. Even if she couldn’t expect that Tom would know what to do, just the fact that he knew would infinitely lighten the burden.

She placed the memory of the photos firmly out of mind, telling herself that Emsworth was all talk. He could have pulled those images from anywhere; he could have found them online and printed them off to scare her with.