Then one morning, Maisie begged. ‘Please visit him. I don’t think he’ll listen to anyone else.’ And the look on her daughter’s face caught her out. All Maisie’s affected teenage-weariness was gone. She looked like she had when she was toddler, bereft at some catastrophe but still hoping and believing that her mother might fix the world. Fit a dropped scoop of ice-cream back into its cone. Find a lost stuffed giraffe. Ungraze a knee. ‘Mum, I’m really worried he’s going to kill himself.’

Becky felt a tight and bewildering knot of righteousness and grief forming. She had let Adam keep his freedom, let his parents keep their pride in him, let him have his daughter’s love and respect. She’d let him keep it all for the sake of Maisie. All she had asked was to be cut free of him so that she could graft herself to something new and grow again.

She could have stayed home that day, ignored her daughter’s requests and the looming threat. And yet, she found herself travelling up twenty-three floors in a whisper-quiet lift to the door of Adam’s apartment. The truth was that she could live with him being dead to her, but she could not live with the idea of his death forever on her conscience any more than he could with her, sixteen years ago.

His death would leave so much destruction in its wake. Her own sacrifices. A heartbroken daughter, blaming herself for not being enough to keep her father wanting to stay alive. Some of her own grief, perhaps.

She would blame herself for it. And she was done with blame. She had to be.

Adam answered the door dressed in a ratty navy dressing gown. He looked authentically terrible. A sour smell hung off him and it looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. She hadn’t called to let him know she was coming.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

He turned and walked back inside. Below the floor to ceiling window panes, the city spread out, cut through with a river.

‘You need to stop this,’ Becky said. ‘You need to sort yourself out. You’re upsetting Maisie. It’s not good enough.’

He turned to her, red eyes welling up. ‘I’ve tried.’

‘So try harder.’

It occurred to her that it was possible that Adam’s actions in the last month, the worry he was causing his family and their friends and their daughter, might all have been orchestrated to bring her to this moment. Brought here so that she could bear witness to him paying a price. A calculated offering of despair and atonement, manufactured to satisfy her. She realized that she would never know for sure. And also that, in truth, perhaps it didn’t matter.

‘I can’t live with it,’ he said eventually.

‘With what?’

‘With you thinking about me like that.’