Leah gets out of her chair and goes to him. It’s a risk, but she feels compelled to put her arms around him and draw him close. He lets himself be pulled into her embrace, and she reaches a hand up to his head, strokes his hair back, runs her fingertips down over the crevice at the base of his skull where it meets his neck. Only this morning, she had lain in bed beside him, his body spooned into hers, and she had kissed him there in that tender place. Now, everything is different.

‘Why?’ he says again, whispering it into her hair.

‘Because I was ashamed,’ she answers truthfully. ‘Because I didn’t want anyone to know.’

She draws back so she can look him in the eye while she says these things. ‘It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, Jake, and for a long time, I thought it would destroy me. But then I learnt that if I could just put it behind me, if I could force it deep down into a dark corner of my past – try to forget about it – I could survive. That was the only way. I had a choice, and I chose to live, even though that meant cutting myself off from my home, my parents, all my old friends. I had to start over. To take that second chance. And when I met you it suddenly seemed possible that I really could begin again. A clean sheet, a fresh start – all those stupid clichés were real. I love you, Jake. I’m still the same person. This terrible thing happened to me ten years ago, when I was just a teenager. It doesn’t define me. It doesn’t change how I feel about you. But the question is,’ and here her voice falters a little, ‘does it change how you feel about me?’

She lets her arms fall, a little pocket of air coming between their bodies, and waits. Her eyes pass over his face, see the seriousness in his frown. His skin is ashen, and he looks thin and grey in the gloom. Outside, the rain is coming down heavily now, but she doesn’t turn to look at it. Instead, she tracks the changing expression on his face. He opens his mouth to speak, but pauses, his frown deepening into a question.

‘How did the newspaper find out? About what happened to you all those years ago.’

Her heart gives a hard beat. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Then who knows about it?’

‘My parents. And the people of our town, but –’

‘And no one else? Anyone at work? The girls you used to share with?’

‘No.’ But her voice is tapering off, a new suspicion entering it, and immediately he picks up on it.

‘I just don’t understand how they could put you with Anton, then somehow dig up this thing from your past.’