‘I know. I just really want to make that film. I feel like I have to at least have that, after everything. You paid for me to do all the stuff that let me get my foot in the door. I can’t walk away with nothing apart from a few years helping other people make their own things. I want to have my thing.’

‘I understand.’

‘If I get hit by a bus, I want Maisie to have something that she can say I did. Something I made happen, that I put all of myself into.’

‘You could also try and avoid buses.’

‘I’m trying to stay alive, obviously.’

But then she remembers that of course he doesn’t take that for granted. He has seen her not wanting to be alive. He heard her admit it and then he tied himself to her, so that if she went, he’d be blamed.

They wait side by side for the lift in silence, heads bowed. She grips his hand tightly.

Had he loved her that much, even then? To hold her in the world like that, at such a cost? Even when she was broken, withdrawn, in hell, swollen with a baby she couldn’t wait to be rid of, full of anger and hate. Her own father hadn’t loved her through that.

Had Adam felt sorry for her? Or had he loved her? She supposed, one day, that she might ask him and now that day has come into view, and so chaotically. What had she meant, pulling him into her, wrapping her legs around him to lock him into her, feeling him come inside her, and wanting her whole skin to be touching his – what had that meant?

‘You could put the job aside for a bit,’ he says quietly.

‘It can’t just be any old film. It has to be Medea and it’s not the time to walk away. Projects have a moment. If you miss it, it becomes something that didn’t get off the ground. Nobody wants to be a part of one of those, something everyone else walked away from. It’s just how it is. If I don’t make it now, it’ll die. I know it.’

They pass through reception. They check the pool complex. Maisie isn’t there. Fear pricks through Becky’s body.