‘You don’t have to ask permission to come and go, Lizzie. I’m not your keeper. This is your home now, remember? I did just want to have a quick chat with you before you collect Lenny, though, about you speaking with the police. It’s standard procedure for all my ladies and I only agreed to let you in when you promised me you would.’

Tess had wanted Lizzie to ring them the morning after she’d arrived, but Lizzie had managed to stop her. ‘Not yet, please,’ she’d said. ‘Soon, I promise. I just need to rest for a bit first. I’ve not slept in so long.’

It was on that first day at the shelter that Tess had shown her the list of chores the women shared, with the line ‘Take Maud out’. Her name had also been put next to ‘Fill bird feeders’ and ‘Tuesday breakfast duty’.

Lizzie had added her name next to all the cleaning and cooking slots. She’d happily take out the bins and scrub lentil curry from battered pans used by battered women, but group sessions were a no. A hard-fist no.

Lizzie couldn’t have been the first woman to come to the shelter who didn’t want to talk. All that shame and guilt, anger and resentment. Who wanted to lift the lid on that? How many women would say, with such passionate vehemence, that they’d never let a man hit them, and then did? And then let them do it over and over again? A black eye meant the blood was already draining away: the event had already happened. Where had it really started for these women, who all thought they were different? Lizzie knows her own stories, fact and fiction, but they are lost inside her sentences, her word searches, under her clothes, and she is too tired to find them.

Tess had offered to make her a doctor’s appointment for a prescription. Antidepressants, maybe antibiotics, too (‘That burn looks jolly nasty’), but Lizzie didn’t want to be zoned out. Now she sweeps floors with a zeal not seen in the shelter, where women sag, like bags of flour, on sofas and chairs, pecked scarecrows with their insides on their outsides. Although not all of them. Some are wound up taut, elastic bands, who jump and snap at the slightest sound. Others sit staring, as blank as walls. Meanwhile Lizzie scours and steams and scrubs, her old life playing like a newsreel inside her head. Black and white, an era she can’t go back to. There was a time when her biggest challenge was how to get a reluctant reader to try. Spreadsheets and lesson plans used to keep her up at night. How she had longed for sleep, for peace and quiet. She could doze with her face pressed against the steamed-up window of a bus.