She had fled from the kitchen that Sunday afternoon, embarrassed to have been caught seeing Matthew with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That was all. That’s all she saw, all she thought she saw.

Becky pictures Pips in tears on his bed, his father made monstrous to him, and Matthew desperate to console him, to convince him that there are liars in the world. Liars who can reach out and harm you and who need to be fought.

She runs through the aches in her lungs. She wants to test the limits of her legs and her heart, to see how far her body can carry her before it starts to feel light and faint, for the edges of her vision to go cloudy white before everything fades to a pinpoint and then black.

Is Becky strong enough for the fight? She feels the question like a prosecutor’s interrogation. Perhaps she is. She should be. She doesn’t think she is.

Rebecca Shawcross denies being the woman in the kitchen and has launched a strongly worded defence of the man she credits as ‘investing in women as staff and in telling women’s stories on screen.’ She said, ‘I’ve never seen anything to make me doubt him.’

Once at home, she races to the bathroom. Locks the door behind her with one hand while scrolling through her phone with the other.

Twitter friends post on their timelines that they know Rebecca and believe her. She is a good woman and a talented producer and deserves better than this shit-show.

Does she? Does she deserve better? She switches to Scott’s Instagram account before she allows the thought to take root further.

Scott is modelling different outfits for THE BIG NIGHT on his feed. Monochrome suit and tie? Nothing says style like black and white. Or fluoro-green T-shirt and jacket, perhaps. Dare to stand out?

She grits her teeth. ‘Dare to stand out?’ she hisses, and types beneath his post:

I hate you, I fucking hate you so much, I hate you I hate you I hate you

But even as she watches the words appear she knows they are empty, pointless, not enough, never enough and so she stops.

Delete, delete, delete

She opens the bathroom medicine cabinet and finds the nail scissors.

She sits on the edge of the bath, eyes closed, breathing hard still from the exertion of exercise and the adrenaline tracking hot and alive through her veins.

She rolls down her joggers, then makes a tiny cut on the inside of her thigh, a V-shaped snip, the shape of a baby bird’s beak. Blood pours out of its mouth.

Chapter 18

Monday morning she wakes as dawn is breaking, after only a few hours’ sleep.