Jenny’s fingers tugged at the hem of the bedsheet, pleating it into little folds. “To be honest, I wasn’t all that worried about that. Maybe you’re right: maybe deep down I thought there was nothing there. But just in case … And it meant so much to him. So I said OK.” Her fingers were moving faster. “Maybe that was my mistake; that was where I went wrong. Maybe if I’d put my foot down right then, he’d have forgotten about it. Do you think?”

It felt like something scalding into my skin, that desperate plea, like something I would never be able to scrape off. I said, “I doubt he would have forgotten about it.”

“You think? You don’t think if I’d just said no, everything would have been OK?”

I couldn’t bear her eyes. I said, “So Pat made a hole in the wall?”

“Yeah. Our lovely house, that we’d worked like crazy to buy and keep nice, that we used to love, and now he was smashing it to pieces. I wanted to cry. Pat saw my face and he went, really grim, ‘What’s it matter? A couple more months and it’ll be the bank’s anyway.’ He’d never said anything like that before. Before, we’d both always been all, ‘We’ll find a way, it’ll be OK …’ And the look on his face … There was nothing I could say. I just turned around and walked out and left him there, hammering the wall. It fell apart like it was made out of nothing.”

I checked my watch again, out of the corner of my eye. For all I knew Fiona already had her ear pressed to the door, trying to work out whether to burst in. I shifted my chair even closer to Jenny—it made the hair at the top of my head lift—so she wouldn’t raise her voice.

She said, “And then the new camera didn’t catch anything, either. And a week later the kids and I got back from the shops and there was another hole, in the hall. I went, ‘What’s this?’ and Pat was like, ‘Give me the car keys. I need another monitor, quick. It’s moving back and forth between the sitting room and the hall—I swear it’s deliberately screwing with me. One more monitor and I’ve got the bastard!’ Maybe I could have put my foot down then, maybe that was when I should’ve done it, but Emma was all, ‘What? What? What’s moving, Daddy?’ and Jack was yelling, ‘Bastard bastard bastard!’ and I just wanted to get Pat out of there so I could sort them. I gave him the keys, and he practically ran out the door.”

A bitter little smile, one-sided. “More excited than he’d been in months. I told the kids, ‘Your daddy thinks we might have a mouse, don’t worry about it.’ And when Pat got back—with three video monitors, just in case, when Jack’s wearing secondhand jeans—I said to him, ‘You need to not talk about this around the kids, or they’ll get nightmares. I’m serious.’ He was all, ‘Yeah, course, you’re right as usual, no problem.’ That lasted, what, two hours? That same evening I was in the playroom, reading to the kids, and Pat came running in with one of those bloody monitors, going, ‘Jen, listen, it’s making this mad hissing noise in there, listen!’ I gave him the daggers but he didn’t even notice, not till I said, ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ and then he actually looked pissed off.”