I slept in the guest room. Even with a wall between me and Zac, I tamped the quilt into the mattress around me. I was in a quilt bubble. I was like a pill in a blister pack. It was the best I could do, because they had removed all the locks from the doors, not trusting me. Once, I woke in the night, and caught him kneeling by the side of my bed with his hand in my hair. I screamed and knocked it away and he flew from the room, telling me he was sorry, promising never to do it again.

One afternoon, about two weeks after I left hospital, I was sitting on the red velvet cushion of the window seat that overlooked the back garden. My knees were drawn up, and I’d pulled the flowered curtains closed to make a cocoon for myself. I heard the rustle of fabric and lifted my head to see Zac standing near, clutching a cup of chamomile tea in one hand and folds of chintz in the other. His knuckles were white, as if he’d been in dread of what he would find behind the curtain.

‘The cowslips are over,’ he said, handing me the tea and looking through the window. ‘Remember when you told me their leaves were like tongues? I love how you see things, Holly. I’m sorry’ – his voice was thick – ‘I’m sorry you missed the cowslips.’

I said that I was feeling a bit better, and watched his face light up as if it really mattered to him that I had glanced at the fields behind the house to look for the wildflowers that were no longer there.

During dinner that night, when he left the dining room to get himself another beer, I tipped the contents of two of my sedative capsules into his beef casserole and stirred it in. My own dinner was untouched, the elderflower he had poured me hardly sipped, and it was a measure of how he tiptoed around me that he said nothing.

Early the next morning, before the sun was up, I slipped out of bed. It was a summer storm. The air was so heavy with rain that I couldn’t see the lighthouse lamp, however hard I squinted, and this felt like another blow, another goodbye that had been stolen from me. The wind noise and the sea noise were one noise, and I couldn’t disentangle them.

I knew what Zac would find, when he woke from his pill-induced sleep, and what he would do. He would find the house abandoned, but I had left a trail for him. He would track me to a little-known, hard-to-access section of the cliffs.