When she speaks her voice is gentle. ‘What exactly are we talking about, Isobel?’

The question takes me by surprise. This event has defined the past year of my life and, despite having first met Maureen a year or so before it happened, I’ve never told her. And she has never asked, never pushed me on the time I was away, choosing to accept my streamlined version of events when I said I’d been spending time with my parents in France.

Other than Oscar, I’ve never told anyone, not even my mum and dad who were happy to write off the weeks I spent with them, largely spent in traumatised silence, as the fallout from the breakdown of my only relationship.

People know – of course they know; everyone seems to know some version of what happened to Jess, and has cast their own judgements accordingly. But it hadn’t come from me. Ben and Si only heard as much from my own mouth as I needed to tell them in order to explain the need for time off. Presumably the rest had filtered through to them via the rumour mill that no self-respecting reporter could have ignored, but even so they have never mentioned what happened to my face, not directly.

And yet, when I finally start to tell the story now, I find I cannot stop. It’s like a purging.

‘It was a year ago …’ I continue, and as I speak, my mind retreats to that summer, London groaning under the relentless heat so that no one knew what to do with themselves. Buses barely moved, consuming the roads like steaming pressure cookers chugging slowly through sluggish streets, the tube system practically melting in on itself.

So much of that time I have since managed to push deep into the recesses of my memory, where it has stagnated, the poison leaking out into my system.