What of that time (Maisie must have been six or seven) when Becky had arranged to meet that man in the garden of a local pub? He’d drunk four pints of cider, she’d smoked a lot of cigarettes and they had talked about soap opera and Big Brother. She wasn’t attracted to his thoughts, his voice, his thin nose or rubbery lips but she still travelled with him in a bleach-smelling lift up to the eleventh floor of a council block overlooking Canary Wharf, and she still willingly took her jeans off while seated on his faux leather couch. She thought she was ready. She’d told herself in the run-up that sex post-rape could free her if only she was strong enough to achieve it.

But she wasn’t ready and so, being thrown back into the very past she was trying to escape at the cider and boiled-sweet smell of that man’s skin, had felt like a failure. The fact of his body coming down hot and heavy on hers, ridiculous to think it now, but she had felt she was as close to death as if she were trapped inside a sandwich toaster. She had asked to leave before things went further, and he let her.

At home she had destroyed ten years of her old school exercise books in a bonfire, incanting Scott’s name as she watched charred black feathers of paper rise to the sky, as if somehow these actions might cauterize the places he was still growing inside her and grant her peace.

It was several years before she tried sex again, that time with a media studies student, still horrible but with greater success – but now, lying in her bed at home, Becky struggles to know whether the last sixteen years would have been any less traumatic had she imagined a faceless ghoul pumping away inside her instead of Scott.

Scott had been like a co-ordinate on a map. He’d given her a diseased kind of security.

Becky comes back to herself remembering Adam. How gently he holds and touches her during sex, how safe she feels safe with him. Perhaps there is no need to reframe her whole past? Perhaps all is well in the present. Perhaps her love of Adam is all she needs now to heal completely. She can choose to think this way and so she does.

Becky arrives at the office and senses immediately that something is wrong. Siobhan glances up briefly and returns to her work, without a word – intent on clearing and sorting, making piles. The next time Siobhan glances up she looks so angry that Becky’s insides ripple, ghost over grave.

‘Is everything OK?’ says Becky, arranging her coat and bag in the crook of her arm.