I felt mortified about Sam. He never came back to Double-decker, at least not while I was there. I called him a few days after the incident, and he was quiet and apologetic, although I felt it was entirely my fault.

‘I hope you will be happy again soon, Maggie,’ he said at the end of a stilted conversation, ‘you deserve to be.’

Dry-eyed, I put the phone down – but his words haunted me for a long time afterwards. I felt hollow and truly ashamed; like I’d compromised everything I’d ever believed in, like I’d let him down.

The following Monday I dragged myself back in to work to face my furious boss.

‘What the fuck were you thinking, Maggie?’ Charlie snarled. He was so angry he could hardly speak, pale beneath his tan. ‘Fucking with Crosswell? I mean, why not choose the son of the most powerful man in TV to hospitalise. Give him some coke and a fucking Polish tart while you’re at it. I trusted you – and you and your loser boyfriend utterly, utterly fucked it up.’

I was completely contrite, tried hard to explain – except what could I possibly say to make it any better? ‘My boyfriend’s an alcoholic and I’m not far off and I kissed the well-connected work-experience because he said I was beautiful; I kissed him because my boyfriend has forgotten me; because I’m so terribly, terribly lonely.’

Charlie was about to sack me, of that I was sure, and then he seemed to realise I was rapidly falling apart – albeit quietly – by this stage coming into work drunk, black-eyed from that flying fist, Alex’s fingerprints visible around my neck – and so he gave me a week off to ‘recuperate’, as he called it.

‘Sort it out, Maggie,’ he said, and got his assistant to book me an appointment with the employee counsellor – ‘before you have a complete breakdown, you stupid girl.’ At the time I was just grateful to still have a job; grateful to have an understanding boss; grateful my father hadn’t found out about Alex and me being arrested. It wasn’t until later that I realised Charlie was only worried about being sued by Crosswell or rumbled by Lyons or the press.

I made Alex come with me to Cornwall; I said it was make or break, and of course he knew the truth. The night before we went, Bel turned up at ours when Alex was out and told me how worried she was and that I needed to sort it out – I was drinking too much and smoking again and why was I this thin, it wasn’t natural, and she loved Alex but the two of us were killing one another. And I defended him, saying he’d never laid a finger on me before, but really I knew we were in freefall over a deep chasm. We were never going to get back from there.