She feels sorry for him, despite everything. How must it be to hold your children and still hope to feel loved by them when the world knows you as a rapist?

He sold everything he could. He chose to leave rather than attempt to rebuild. He probably calls it retirement, but really it was flight – from the film festivals that would no longer host him, from journalists who could no longer be relied on to write hagiographies, from actors who’d refuse to be seen having a drink with him.

He at least has his money. He has his awards statuettes and his film credits. Somebody will love him again, somebody foolish enough might even trust him. But it’s a grim shadow of what he had.

It is time to go. She wonders, briefly and absurdly, if she ought to buy something for Amber – a gift, like flowers? She drops the thought as soon as it arrives. It’s not a moment she can pad out with gifts and other such evasions.

At the trial Amber had said, ‘I felt like I was going mad. Everyone thought I was making it up, just to sound like I could prove it. And after a while I thought maybe I had made it up. Like nobody had ever been there. And I was this crazy drunk bitch who didn’t know what was real anymore.’ Becky read the full transcript afterwards. As a witness, she hadn’t been allowed to watch Amber giving evidence, not that she could have borne it.

A crazy drunk bitch. Becky could have spared her that.

Becky finds herself slowing down as she walks past beautiful Georgian terraced houses, their black-painted rails pristine against white-painted façades. Amber hasn’t given any indication of what she expects from their meeting, only that she wanted it to happen. Becky tries to think if there is anything at all that she could tell Amber about that night that she hasn’t already disclosed at Matthew’s trial. What more can she offer her, other than an apology, face-to-face? Becky is reminded of Adam crouched against her bedroom wall, shards of shattered china on the floor beside him, looking caged and desolate. Did he want to run then, like she wants to run now?

Adam had sixteen years to think about what he might say, if the day came when he had to account for Maisie’s paternity. And what had he managed, when that moment arrived? He had given an account wherein he was wrongly accused, and of something so monstrous that he was bullied into a lifetime of silence, trapped in a lie. Poor Adam. The victim of her assumptions.