Richard looked incongruous in Kate’s suburban kitchen in his faded, loose-fitting trousers, grey shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, the rumpled, wavy hair, hand reaching up to pass through it, a restless habit of his. She used to find his anger frightening. She wasn’t used to male emotion, had once regarded it as something more valid and powerful than her own. She’d always been the one to try and stay in control and appease him; hold things together. Now she no longer cared.

‘Don’t imitate me.’ She faced him, her tone very cold. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here.’

He stared at her. ‘What’s happened to your hair?’

‘I got it caught in some heavy industrial machinery.’

Richard ignored this, already on to the next thing, pacing the floor. ‘You go off one night with no explanation. You never answer the phone. I come over and you’re always out . . . Anna, this is ridiculous. You’ve been here a month and you said it’d be a few days . . .’

‘And you said you’d be home that night I came, and you weren’t. I’ve had enough of that.’

‘Look – ’ Richard paced up and down the kitchen, palm outstretched as if explaining something really-very-simple to a perverse child. ‘It was one of those things. We’d had a case conference – all sorts of added complications – one of the key social workers was delayed. It was a very unusual situation.’ His rubber-soled shoes gave off a squeak as he spun round on the lino. ‘It’s just the way it is, Anna. I can’t drop everything and come home just because you’ve got a meal ready, can I? There are wider concerns, and sometimes they have to come first, that’s all.’

‘Fine.’ She could feel an ecstatic anger rising in her, her body tensing with the force of it.

‘So what’s going on? Why aren’t you answering the phone? You must have finished packing up here by now. I thought it’d take a week, max. I’ll give you a hand with the last things, if there’s more to do. Take a carload to Oxfam or whoever first thing in the morning, and we can get back home.’

‘And then what?’ she asked, controlling her voice.

‘Well – we can just get on with life again.’

After a silence, she said, ‘I’m not coming home. I don’t want to live with you any more. I don’t love you. I want to be on my own.’

Richard stopped pacing, was actually listening. ‘But you’ve got to be back at school any day now.’

‘I’ve given up my job.’

He walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She felt herself shrinking from him. Her life with him now felt like something from which she had woken – a trance in which she had lost consciousness.

His voice was soft and persuasive, eyes fixed on hers in a practised look of concern. ‘Anna? You can’t be serious? Look, I know it’s been a bad month. Your mum and everything. But you can’t let all this take over your life. You have to keep things in perspective. God knows, I see enough of the consequences of people letting things get to them too much. And you’re too intelligent to let that happen.’