‘And you didn’t ask me,’ he says, with a voice that is both choked and perfectly clear. ‘You didn’t say yes and you didn’t say no. And then it was you who forced me to lie.’

‘What?’

He unfolds himself from his kneeling position on the carpet and stands up.

‘You said you’d been raped that night,’ he says. ‘And that wasn’t true. But I didn’t have any way of proving it. Maybe if you’d said you couldn’t remember, or that you’d done something stupid while you were blacked-out, then I could have said: “no, that was us, that was you and me. Don’t you remember?” But instead you said you’d been raped. And by the time I got my head around that, I couldn’t come back from it. You never let there be a question about what had happened. You said you were raped and that was it. So that either made me a rapist or not. And I wasn’t a rapist. Not then, not ever. I don’t blame you for anything. I really don’t. But can’t you see how what you were saying made things impossible for me?’

The world recedes. Becky tries to hold onto what is happening. Can he possibly be asking her to apologize to him? Is that where he thinks this might end, sixteen years of agony tied off with an admission from her that yes, perhaps she had been over-hasty and backed him into a corner.

All her fault, really. When you think about it.

He continues speaking, filling her silence with his words. ‘I’m not saying you did anything wrong, Becks,’ he says. ‘Not at all. I should have told you what I remembered, as soon as you said anything. I just want you to understand how it was. From my side of things.’ The view from his side of the bed. ‘What you thought happened, didn’t happen.’

‘Is that what you’d tell Maisie? That you listened to me say I wanted to kill myself and you said nothing, because what, I’d got it all mixed up in my pretty little head?’ Her stomach is hot with acid, the spit cold on her chin. ‘That my version of events was, simply, according to you, wrong?’

He says nothing.

‘That you fucked an unconscious girl,’ she continues, ‘and when she woke up alone, with her pants turned inside out, you thought it was best not to say anything, on the off-chance I was trying to … what was it you said? “Let you down gently”?’

He stares down at his kneecaps.

‘Are you honestly still trying to make me believe you’re a decent man?’ she says, her words short with anger, incredulity.

‘I am,’ he says, and she watches his hands travel to his waist and his elbows bend and his chest widen a little. ‘I know I am a decent man.’