Now there is only room in her heart for the practical things that need to be done. ‘Maisie will be back soon because she’ll want to know how I am, and I don’t want her seeing this.’ Becky wonders whether she will be able to control herself when it comes to it: to hold herself back from the impulse to destroy Adam by telling Maisie everything. ‘Come on, sit up,’ she orders him again. ‘We need to decide what to do.’

And he obeys her, eyes red against his pale face.

‘If she asks why we look this way,’ says Becky, ‘it’s because an old friend of ours died today and we just found out. Someone from school. No one she knows. I left the room because I didn’t want to spoil her birthday while she was happy opening her presents. If she asks, his name was Ben. We haven’t seen him for a long time. It was just a shock.’

‘Will you let me explain? Please?’

The face she had touched with her fingertips only hours before, communicating something warm like love, is nothing more in that moment than a flesh and skin arrangement. The mask that once convinced.

‘I want you out of our lives,’ she says blankly.

‘Would you please just let me tell you what happened?’

Becky sees it so clearly then – this pattern of men calling themselves good men, sitting her down to explain how all the things that she might have seen, or even things that she has had done to her, were in fact nothing. Trivial matters that are easily dismissed, if only she can agree to let their explanations blossom until they fill all the spaces left by her questions. Let me tell you. Allow me to explain. This is the way things are.

Adam begins whimpering then, like a dog or a child. ‘Please, just hear me out.’

Even as her curiosity gets the better of her, even as she tells him, ‘Fine, explain,’ she doesn’t believe that she’ll be given the truth. Not if the truth costs him more than the price he’s prepared to pay for it.

‘I was in love with you—’

‘So you lied to me for sixteen years.’

‘No!’ he says. ‘That’s not what it was. Please. It’s important you know I loved you. I’ve always loved you.’

She stands up then, to make herself bigger, wanting to cower over him in his crouched position, to make him feel as small as she had once felt. But she does not walk towards him, she is not ready to be an inch closer to his body. Instead she lowers and loudens her voice.