After that, her life had been a sickening rollercoaster of pain and emotional torment. She had learned to recognise the threats: the heightened colour in his face, his sweaty forehead and flared nostrils, and the wild glare in his eyes, but sometimes she noticed these warnings too late to escape his punches. After a violent outburst he would treat her so kindly, it made her yearn for him. She wondered if it was his way of showing he felt contrite, because he never apologised for hurting her. To do so would have been an admission of his guilt. The really stupid part of it was that she had seen that kind of domination before; she, of all people, should have known better. For a while she had refused to acknowledge what was happening. Only when her mother had commented on her bruised wrist had she been forced to admit the truth to herself.

Even then she had done her best to shrug off her realisation. ‘Jason doesn’t know his own strength.’ Her words had sounded hollow to her own ears while she thought, ‘Oh my God, is it really possible that I’ve married a violent man?’

Her mother had given her a curious look and Jessica had let out a braying laugh, so loud it sounded forced. It had taken her another year to recognise that she was not only miserable, she was actually at risk, but by then it was too late for her to walk away. She was trapped.

‘That’s my baby you’re carrying,’ he said to her, ‘yours and mine. There’s no way you’re taking him away from me.’

Jason made it quite clear what he would do to her if she tried to leave him. On the few occasions she attempted to remonstrate with him, he lost his temper, although he never once hit her while she was pregnant with Daisy. In a way that made her feel worse than before, knowing that he could control his violent outbursts when he chose. In any case, it made no difference by then, because physical violence was only one of the methods he used to intimidate and control her. He had subtle ways to break her will, and she had learned to become complicit in tolerating his abuse.

What made the situation more difficult was that she had to conceal her injuries. In one of his fits of rage, he had clouted her so hard on the side of her head that the hearing in one of her ears was impaired. She dared not go to the doctor about it for fear they would discover the cause of her partial deafness. Of course she could have claimed she had fallen over, but somehow lying like that seemed complicated. And whatever happened, she couldn’t risk Jason finding out she had spoken about her injuries to a third party.