‘She hates me so much.’

‘She rang me. Which means she was checking on you at five in the morning. That’s not someone who hates you.’

‘Yeah, it is. You can hate someone and still have to look after them. I bet there are psychopath murderers whose mums still turn up for prison visits.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

‘I’m not going to know …’

‘How’d you mean?’

‘Whether it turns out decent or … a criminal like its father.’

‘What?’ Adam has gone very still.

‘Someone raped me when I was passed out. That’s why I’m pregnant.’ She looks directly at him. The words feel numb and stripped to her, like they belong to somebody else. ‘I don’t remember any of it. It happened at that house party in Hampstead.’

Adam says nothing, his eyes just visible in the near-dawn light, wide and horrified.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he says, finally.

‘I think it was Scott … it was Scott who raped me. He tried to do something earlier in the evening but I didn’t want to. We did a pill instead and …’

‘And what?’

‘I woke up and I’d been … I just don’t remember anything. Scott was the last person I was with, I think he was there when … But I don’t know.’ After a few minutes have passed and Adam hasn’t spoken, Becky says, ‘I don’t even know if it was definitely against my will because I can’t remember, I just can’t … Like, maybe I said yes?’ Another minute passes and Adam touches her hand gently, unfurling it from its tight grip around her own wrist, like she has been trying to conceal something there.

The morning after the party, fingerprint bruises had come up on her wrist, gradually, like a series of little images appearing in a polaroid picture. The bruises have long since disappeared but she still finds herself holding a place that feels branded, laid claim to. Who had done it? Had she done it? Had she been the cause of her own pain?

‘Can you please just say something?’ She says eventually, turning to Adam.

‘Sorry.’ He is crying. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’

She reaches for the bottle at her feet. ‘I shouldn’t have got so wasted. I was out of it. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t …’ She is gritting her teeth and trying not to cry when she hurls the bottle into a high arc. They both watch it smash across a steel upright of the junior swings.

‘I didn’t go to the police or anything,’ she says, a tear tracking her cheek. ‘I mean, what would I say? I got drunk and did drugs and blacked out. What are they going to do?’

‘Why didn’t you get rid of it?’ He catches himself. ‘Sorry. Fucking stupid question. Ignore me.’