‘Who did this to you, Lizzie?’ Luke’s voice had been quiet, but she still said nothing. ‘Was it his dad?’ Luke had nodded to the window. Outside, Lenny had taken off his boots and was wiping the mud and wet grass off them with his T-shirt. Wolfie sat next to him, giving him the odd lick here and there.

Lizzie couldn’t find her voice and Luke had taken her silence as a confession.

‘Are you safe,’ Luke had asked her gently, ‘when you go home?’

‘We ran away. We live in a shelter. Some of the cuts are just slow to heal,’ Lizzie had said into his chest, into the warmth of another body, after such a long time of being the strong one. She’d held Lenny like this so many times. How wonderful it felt to be the one being comforted, being held, just this once. Just for a little while.

Now, back at the shelter, alone in the bathroom, she keeps on splashing her face with water, but it’s incapable of washing anything away. When the door creaks she assumes it’s Lenny, come to find her, missing the shape of her next to him in the bed. ‘Night, Lenny,’ she says each night, as he is pulled into slumber, away from her. ‘I’ll meet you in my dreams.’ It never happens, though. She dreams of things that have already happened and – thankfully – Lenny is never there.

Her visitor is not her son. It’s a wet nose, followed by two pointy ears. Maud walks in slowly, her paws making a clicking noise. She stops near Lizzie’s ankle and gives it a lick. Her tongue is warm and wet, and Lizzie isn’t sure she likes it, but Maud won’t stop.

‘Why won’t you leave me alone?’ she whispers to Maud, but Maud carries on licking the patches of skin she can find, and it’s stupid but Lizzie almost feels like she’s being cleansed somehow. She slides to the floor and tips her head back against the wall, letting Maud complete her expurgation.

George

(How could you do this to me?)

GEORGE IS AT BETTY’S house. She’s finally decided to do some work on her garden and has asked George to help. Nothing flash or too tricky to manage. Just pots of bright colour here and there – she points to the exact spots. She doesn’t have time for anything more, she tells George, almost apologetically, as if he’s desperate to do it.

He’s in the little shed in the garden, marvelling at how neatly her husband’s tools are lined up, how clean they look. He’s searching for a screwdriver to make holes in a hanging basket, digging through the old dresser drawer, when he finds it.