She knew Ellie hadn’t meant to be funny – her friend’s voice vibrated with fury, and in truth she wouldn’t have imagined she could smile at anything today with her world in fragments – but from somewhere she found a laugh bubbling up, a real laugh, not like the way she’d felt a minute or two before. The feeling passed in an instant but it enabled her to say weakly, ‘So the wedding’s off and I’m going to leave here today, Ellie. I can’t stay. Mrs Walton said I could live there but I need to get right away where there’s no danger I could run into Adam or Olive.’

Ellie nodded. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Newcastle. I’ve got enough put by to rent a room in a house somewhere while I look for work, any work.’

‘Right.’ Ellie squared her narrow shoulders. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Come with me?’

‘You don’t think I’d let you go by yourself? Safety in numbers and all that.’

‘You can’t just leave here, Ellie. What about your job at the baker’s? You’ve done so well there and they think the world of you. You’ve had a rise each year since you’ve worked there.’

‘That’s because I work longer and harder than anyone else and old Fairley knows which side his bread’s buttered,’ said Ellie matter-of-factly. She knew no one else would start work at seven o’clock in the morning and work through till ten or eleven at night like she did, and she was agreeable to turning her hand to anything, from humping stones of flour into the bath tins first thing to start the bread-making process off, right through to helping Fairley’s wife do all the fancy cooking like the teacakes and sugared buns and iced biscuits. Aye, Fairley knew it paid him to keep her feeling valued, but the bakery was a sanctuary away from her father’s fists so it worked both ways.

‘But what about your mam?’ Ruby didn’t mention Ellie’s da. Everyone knew what Mr Wood was like although no one had ever confronted him, not even when he’d thrown one of Ellie’s sisters down the stairs and she’d been in the infirmary for weeks. You can’t interfere in the way a man is in his own home. That’s what her own mam had said when she had told her about Ellie’s sister. Ruby hadn’t agreed with the sentiment and she’d said so, but her mother had just shaken her head and said it was the way things were.