I stare at her. She looks levelly back and she’s so calm it unnerves me.

‘So you’re okay with them heading back to Grosseto?’

‘Yes,’ she says firmly.

I rest my elbows on my knees and drop my head into my hands. I wait until my pulse subsides. ‘I don’t get it. It’s just… The doctor thought you might have been… raped.’

‘Oh. That.’

I whip my head round and look at her in astonishment.

‘Yeah. It hurt to sit down for a bit,’ she wisecracks, and then she starts crying.

‘Bee…’

I grab a tissue and thrust it at her, and then I hold her hand. I can’t remember the last time I saw my sister cry. I don’t even recall her crying when I fell from the top of the ruin in the garden and everyone was so mad at her, and she was only nine or ten.

She blows her nose and winces at the pain in her head.

‘It was Stuart,’ she says. She presses the tissue against her lip, which has started bleeding again.

‘Stuart?’

‘My executive producer.’

‘Look, you don’t have to talk about this now if you…’

‘I’ve kind of been seeing him.’ She glances at me. ‘Yes, Nick, of course I know he’s fucking married.’

I squeeze her hand. It’s not like I’m in any position to judge, given what a shit I was to Maddison.

‘Never in public. He wanted it to be a secret. He kept promising that he’d get me back on The Show. The exec was a mate of his. So he said.’

Tears are running down her blotched and bruised cheeks.

‘So what happened?’

She takes a sip from the glass by her bed, and I hear the slow sound of her trying to swallow the water as if it’s solid.

‘It was the night before this Italian trip. We were in the studio after we’d finished filming the programme. Drinking a bottle of wine out of plastic cups. Got a bit drunk. And then – oh, you know how I can be. Told him he needed to make me a star. Annihilate Tiffany, the witch. Why wasn’t I on The Show? He got annoyed. He said, “Bethany, your problem is you’re smart without being intelligent, good-looking without being pretty, and approachable in a girl-next-door way, but no one in their right fucking mind would want to be your neighbour.” So I said I’d tell his wife. Post a photo on Twitter.’

I shut my eyes to block out the images: plastic cups rolling on the floor, the dregs of wine spilling across the stain-free carpet; Bethany’s face smashed into a Formica-topped table.

‘The thing is, I did quite like him.’