Then come the endless stream of questions – questions that sound more like accusations: Did it happen at home? In our home? How many of them have there been?

They receive a congratulations card from a neighbour and a helium balloon printed with the words: You’re going to be grandparents! Her father bursts it with the tip of a carving knife.

She stops going to school.

She can’t read. She just wants to watch those soaps on television, to be held in the soft bubble of other people’s mistakes, conflict and intrigues.

Her mum and dad stand in the doorway of her bedroom, faces pinched with anger. They ask her the same questions every day.

Who did this to you?

Who is its father?

Chapter 8

It had been a post on Scott’s Instagram account that gave her the idea for her film.

Judging by his Twitter and Facebook, Scott had been in Birmingham for a weekend of clubbing and drinking with a friend of his. The next day he’d visited an art gallery in an attempt, he quipped in his caption, to experience more than the city’s capacity to get you really drunk. LOL Scott. His favourite painting had been one of Medea, made by an artist called Frederick Sandys. He took a snap and posted it on Instagram. Just one more image in a cluster of his weekend shots.

Becky had been transfixed by it. Wreathed in red coral necklaces, with desperate eyes, and an obsessively incanting mouth, Medea looks away as she makes her poison. To where does she look? The hours ahead of her? To infamy and damnation?

Becky had lost a whole afternoon to it. Medea. Studying the image, reading the play’s text. Some lines, over and over: Here are the women with ancient anger in their veins.

She obsessed over why this picture, of all the pictures in the gallery, had spoken to Scott: did he wonder if she, Becky, was still out there, coming for him some day? His own personal Medea, unstoppable in her rage. She had known within minutes that this character was one she needed to advocate for: in her research, she saw more meaning in Medea than she’d found in many years of therapy.

Her updated version would be a message to Scott that the consequence of what he did would never leave him, and a warning to men that their crimes against women, the injustice of their contempt for women, might be challenged. These men lacked her vision for pain. They could imagine her only as outcast and beaten, once they had no need for her. She was meant to be used, spent, and discarded.

But Medea would show them what power lies at the heart of rage.

These were some of the things Becky said to the screenwriter she hired and instructed to see what she saw.