Maybe she had a point here. I said nothing. Because when my daughter felt cornered she refused to budge from a position taken on something. Two years previously she’d been seeing this real deadbeat guy, ‘an artist biker’, whose dream was to open his own tattoo parlor, and who struck me about as artistic as a garbage can. I also sensed that he had this resentful streak. Still, Klara was crazy about him. When Agnieska finally met him she went hysterical afterwards and gave our daughter a crazed earful about her bad choice in boyfriends. This naturally made Klara defend the guy even more ferociously. She was with him for another eight long months … until she found out that he’d cheated on her with a fellow tattoo designer. I was quietly pleased that the clown had destroyed any feelings that my daughter had for him and that I had managed for once to put my foot down with Agnieska. I insisted that she did not go into her ‘I told you so’ routine which she liked to pull whenever something she disapproved of went wrong for somebody else. Especially as Klara showed real smarts and maturity in shoving the guy out the door. It was another important sign to me that, after a roller coaster of an adolescence, my daughter had become rational and focused – even though she got me a little worried when she told me a few months back that the shelter for battered women where she worked had suffered a security breach. Their armed guard had stepped away from the back exit for a two-minute bathroom break. It allowed the furious, crazy violent husband of a woman they’d been sheltering to burst in. He was brandishing a pistol and threatened to shoot the staff. Fortunately the other security guy on the front door was alerted and came running in, slamming his rifle butt into the guy’s head.

‘Security’s been beefed up since then,’ she said, trying to reassure me. But I was anything but reassured.

‘We keep quiet about our work,’ she said, ‘but there are a lot of angry men out there who have abused women and now look upon us as the enemy for getting their partners away from their violence; a violence which, like most abusers, they refuse to acknowledge ever having committed.’