A sudden thought occurred to my ignorant, privileged self. ‘Do you have a washing machine?’

‘Yes!’

I waited. The façade continued to crack.

‘It’s broken, okay? Happy? Like the shower and the oven and most other things in this house.’ She kicked at a chair leg, which tilted three inches to the side, causing the pile of papers and other mess to slip off onto the floor, as if proving her point.

In answer to her question, no, I was not happy. I felt as though my heart had cracked right down the middle. I wanted to scoop this precious girl up and carry her far, far away, to a world where nothing was broken, neither household appliances nor people. Where women didn’t have to bundle their baby out of bed and flee in the middle of the night with nothing but a couple of tatty rucksacks and the scars of trauma and abuse. Where working your backside off six days a week, leaving your child to fend for herself for hours on end, meant that at least you had enough to put food in the fridge and pay for a plumber so you could be clean, and hang on to what remained of your dignity.

I couldn’t take Joan out of this miserable situation. I prayed it wouldn’t spiral to the point where someone else had to, for her own protection. The prospect of having to call social services filled me with thick, black dread.

I summoned up the strength to eradicate the jitters from my voice, and persuaded Joan to spend an hour in my bathroom while I lugged bin bags of clothes and bedding and towels across the garden and piled them in a disturbingly high pile in front of my washing machine.

By the time the first load had finished, a washing line had been strung up between two trees at Joan and Leanne’s side of the lawn. I waved my thanks at the kitchen window of Middle Cottage, trying to stem the flood of tears before Joan was finished in the bathroom.