Dina stared, propped up on her elbows. She had never heard that whip-crack in my voice before. The gobsmacked look on her face swelled that balloon inside my chest. For a terrifying instant I thought I was going to laugh.

“Tell me something,” she said. Her eyes had narrowed: the gloves were coming off. “Do you sometimes wish I would die? Like when my timing is shit, like now. Do you wish I would just die? Do you hope someone’ll ring you in the morning and go, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, a train just splattered your sister’?”

“Of course I don’t want you to die. I’m hoping you’ll ring me in the morning and go, ‘Guess what, Mick, you were right, Geri isn’t actually a form of torture banned by the Geneva Convention, somehow I’ve survived—’”

“Then why are you acting like you wish I would die? Actually I bet you don’t want a train, you want it to be all neat, don’t you, all nicey-neat—how do you hope it? Hang myself, is that what you’d like, or an overdose—”

I didn’t feel like laughing any more. My hand was clenched around the wineglass, so tight I thought it would smash. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous. I’m acting like I want you to have a little self-control. Just enough to put up with Geri for two fucking days. You really think that’s too much to ask?”

“Why should I? Is this some kind of stupid closure thing, you fix this case it makes up for what happened to Mum? Because if it is then puke, I can’t even stand you, I’m going to puke all over your sofa right this—”

“This has fucking nothing to do with her. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. If you can’t come up with anything that makes more sense than that, maybe you should keep your big yap shut.”

I hadn’t lost my temper since I was a teenager, not like this and definitely not at Dina, and it felt like doing a hundred down a motorway on six straight vodkas, immense and lethal and delicious. Dina was sitting up, leaning forward across the coffee table, fingers stabbing at me. “See? This is what I’m talking about. This is what this thing is doing to you. You never get mad at me, and now look at you, just look, the state of you, you want to hit me, don’t you? Say it, come on, how badly do you want to—”

She was right: I did, I wanted to slap her right across the face. Some fraction of me understood that if I hit her then I would stay with her, and that she knew it too. I put my glass down on the coffee table, very gently. “I’m not going to hit you.”

“Go on, go ahead, you might as well. What’s the difference? If you throw me away into Geri’s House of Hell and I run away and then I can’t come to you and I can’t hold it together and I end up jumping in the river, how is that better?” She was half on the coffee table, face shoved at me, right within arm’s reach. “You won’t give me one little slap because God no you’re too good for that, fuck forbid you might feel like the bad guy just once, but it’s OK to make me jump off a bridge, right, that’s fine, that’s just—”