A lot of people have wondered over the years why I didn’t leave my job if things were so intolerable at the Safrans’ house. Of course, there were many reasons. You know that saying about the frog in hot water? I was that frog. Yes, Abby was unstable, and David was up all night in his office with a bottle of whisky, and Madison and probably Carson too were being drugged, I assumed by their mother, but I had nowhere else to go and I wasn’t ready to fly back to England with nothing to show for it. I’d boasted so much about my new Hollywood life, and Jenna had boasted even more – she was convinced that I’d be on the red carpet within a year. If I left my job at the Safrans’, I’d have to leave America too, and I’d lose my placement bonus, a significant amount I was relying on to get me to drama school and on to my starry career. And I still held out hope that David might find a film role for me. Another reason was that I was nineteen and not used to standing up for myself. I did what I was told. I listened to my mother and the nanny agency, and to David, who constantly told me the family would fall apart without me, and I believed him.

The other reason was the oldest, sneakiest reason of all time – love. Not David, but Carson. I loved the baby I’d been taking care of for months now. I loved it most of all when he fell asleep on me and latched his little arms around my neck. I couldn’t leave him to whatever catastrophe was unfolding in that house. I was even fond of Madison, for all her difficulties. It wasn’t her fault, after all. Abby had made her the way she was.

Anyway, I didn’t realise how bad things were until that final day, when everything came to a head. It’s human nature. We tell ourselves it can’t be as bad as it seems in our darkest hours, lying awake at 3 a.m. It will get better, we say. We’re imagining it. So yes, it was love and ambition and hope that got me in the end. I had plenty of time afterwards, in prison, to think over the events of that last week, to get the sequence right in my head, and yet I’m still not entirely sure. Memory is like that. It protects us from the worst.