There was one magazine in the pile that didn’t make me physically sick, which had somehow got mixed in. A special issue of a political magazine from June 2013 with a photograph of Edward Snowden on the front. The odd one out didn’t surprise me, given how interested Zac was in surveillance culture and data theft and the threat to individual privacy that algorithms posed.

It took me several minutes before I was calm enough to continue examining the bag’s contents. At the bottom was a black cloth, folded into a parcel, with lumps and bumps inside. I unwrapped the cloth and let the things inside it roll onto the grass. A blindfold, a gag, and several coils of rope that seemed to come right out of the world of those magazines. They were not the flimsy toys of a high street lingerie chain. I rested my mouth and nose against my fist. Could he have used them on Jane? I shook my head, no. He wasn’t stupid – he wouldn’t keep the evidence, however well- hidden, if he had done something terrible with it.

Still, I needed to send these things to Maxine for testing. I calculated the risk of Zac discovering they were missing before I’d got away. It was small. In three weeks I’d be gone. Three weeks was soon. I could get through three little weeks. People did much harder things than that.

I stuffed the magazines and other things in Zac’s old bag, trying not to look at them as I did. I couldn’t possibly lift the bag onto that shelf. The risk to me and the baby was too great. Instead, I dragged it to our recycling bin, which was due to be collected tomorrow, wrestled it in, and covered it with old newspapers. I’d get a message to Maxine that the bag was there and trust her to take care of it.

I triple-checked that everything was in its place in the garage, then closed the door. Maybe, I thought, despite the seriousness of the objects, they were from a phase when Zac was into that, and he put them away because he knew that I was not. But I also knew how interested he was in pornography, with his secret films. Those magazines were on that same spectrum, but more extreme than anything I’d imagined.

I was so absorbed in puzzling all this out that I didn’t hear the rumble of the car’s engine until it was nearly at the end of the long drive to the house. Though I’d phoned Zac in Canada only two hours earlier, I still thought of the young wife in ‘Bluebeard’, terrified that her husband would come for her with his knife before her brothers reached her. What I saw was Milly, her face lit and smiling, so that despite everything, I could feel my own face lighting up too.