Walking has taken her long miles around their new area and she already knows it better than their old patch. It’s harder now, because she is working again and the daytimes no longer belong to her, but as the evenings lighten and lengthen, on those days where after-school things keep Maisie out late, she still tries to walk home, picking a new route as often as possible. Sometimes she thinks of nothing as she strolls through the streets beneath the pointed and mirrored buildings of the City of London, feeling only the sting of particles in her nostrils as she turns on to the pollution-choked A-road in the direction of home. And sometimes, more often than she would like, she feels the still-warm embers in her marrow as she winds through a market selling blackened bananas and haunches of meat wreathed in flies, as her thoughts return to Medea. Was it enough for Medea to watch her husband collapsing with grief at the loss of his children? Did it satisfy, even fleetingly?

On a good day Becky tells herself it was enough that she walked into the police station to give them her story. Sometimes that feeling lasts for hours, sometimes more than a day. On other days, when doubt and recriminations flood in, she tries to lose herself in the easy tedium of office work. She is doing admin in a small solicitor’s office and she likes the simplicity of it. It requires her to be efficient and organized and conscientious, but nothing else. Nobody needs, or asks for, her ideas. She will not change anything here. Her name goes on nothing. She is useful and she is appreciated for it, and the pay is sufficient so long as she and Maisie never do anything expensive. Nobody demands lifelong loyalty from her here. One day she will look further, cast her net for other ways to spend her days but, for now, it is exactly what she needs. For now, it is enough.

On her lunch breaks, Becky sits on the green near the office and watches people talk. She allows herself to zone out, watching how tree branches bend and dip in the breeze. She allows herself to be bored. There is no pressure in this job. No one is emailing her or phoning or texting her any more. Instead there are starlings, turning as one above her, and rats slinking around the sides of a canal, and pretty purple-flowering weeds that spout from a clogged drainpipe.

She has taken to wearing only those clothes that feel good on her skin. On the rare occasion that she buys something new, it is all soft cottons and skirts that float and fall long – styles that may age her but, unlike her old black trousers and button-up shirts, make her feel less held-in, or more softly held.