She realizes that she has chosen a side, in typed and reported words she can read back to herself, that tens of thousands of others can read. She can’t be in the house any more where the air is too close to breathe and it feels like everything is watching her, listening to her.

‘Maisie,’ she calls up the stairs. ‘I have to go, I have to go for a run.’

Maisie emerges from the living room, concern clouding her face. ‘I thought we were about to have breakfast together? I thought we were making—’

‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to make toast. I’ve run out of time. I have to get out, I’m sorry, I just …’

Becky makes her way gingerly through the hallway. Laces up trainers. She doesn’t bother replacing her tracksuit bottoms with running trousers. Doesn’t say any more, just runs out into the early morning sun, past the window where her daughter is standing and watching her.

She threads through people on the pavements, going far too slow.

She has become not the woman in the kitchen. Another lifelong lie to commit to. She has done it once, she can do it again. She knows how to hide the feel of it. She can do this.

She needs to get to the park quicker than this. She speeds up, brushes shoulders with a harassed mother pushing a pram: enough for the woman to spin round and accuse Becky of terrible manners with only a look in her eyes.

She tells herself to calm down. Hears Matthew’s reasoning voice. What does she owe the newspapers? For them it’s a scoop, some sales. They don’t care. The people she owes are the boss who believed in her, the daughter whose home needs to be paid for, the film she has worked so hard to bring into life and which wants to say something important about women. These are real things and they are worth protecting.

Maybe this is OK.

A child’s scream drives itself through her skin.

Did Matthew’s PR people reach out to Amber? Did they offer her a deal for a more cheerful rebuttal, Oh that, that’s all fine! In exchange for working again? For money, maybe? A deal she maybe turned down?

Did Alex’s stories of her emotional and physical messiness only follow when she refused?

What does Amber know?

She glances around the park. The pink Lycra-clad jogger, the khaki-coated dog walker, the dog itself, they’re all judging her. Of course they are.

She didn’t know, she wants to say to them all, she didn’t know what the woman on the floor of that kitchen was feeling.

She runs faster now, fast enough for the sides of her lungs to hurt and gasp and rasp.