It’s ridiculously early – not yet six a.m. She tried to get back to sleep after Aector left but her thoughts are too fizzy, too intense, for her to even consider closing her eyes. She has found herself waking some mornings with little horseshoe grooves dug into the soft flesh of her palms. Sometimes her wrists and elbows ache until lunchtime. She sleeps like a toppled pugilist: a Pompeian tragedy. Sees such terrible things in the few snatched moments of unconsciousness. Her whole world feels displaced; skewed. She thinks of herself as a straw in water: dislocated, refracted, broken. Worse, there is nobody to blame. Her lies have created this new reality; her concealments and deceptions. It doesn’t matter that she has her reasons. The knowledge of what she is doing to Aector is enough to half kill her with guilt.

She glances up. There is a muddy, purply smudge to the sky above the Humber, casting just enough light to lend silvery peaks to the rippling water. She wonders if he is looking at the same sky. Wonders what he is thinking. Whether he is telling her about what a cold and distant bitch his wife has become these past weeks. Wonders if they’ll share a moment. Whether he’ll tell her the lot: open up about that night, twelve years ago, when she climbed into his bed and refused to take no for an answer. About the violence that had preceded it, and the bloodshed that came after. She does not begrudge him a friend and confidante. She just wishes that he would choose somebody less like an older, wiser, cleverer version of herself.

There’s a creak from upstairs. Fin? Lilah? She prays they go back to sleep – have themselves another hour of peaceful nothingness before they have to get up and deal with the distracted, horrible bitch that their mother has recently become.

She leafs through the papers: dog-eared, folded and unfurled so many times that they carry a jigsaw pattern of creases. There is a whiff of the perfume she used to wear. Joop. She thought it smelled awful, but oddly sophisticated, and she needed him to forget that she was just a girl. She sprayed each letter with a liberal dose of scent, even while her sisters, her mum, her auntie, made well-intentioned fun and shook their heads, despairing of the Pavee girl who had taken it upon herself to fall in love with a policeman. She never posted the letters, of course. Wouldn’t know where to send them, or how they would be received. But she enjoyed the act of writing. Adored the thrill that thrummed through her as she sat at the little table in the caravan, and wrote the words Dear Aector.

Footsteps, outside. The soft creak of an opening door. Two heads, peering into the soft darkness of the living room, bed-headed and lovely; still half asleep and muzzy with half remembered dreams.

Lilah, seven, is spokeswoman for the pair. She’s a fierce little thing: dark hair, blue eyes, a vocabulary that bamboozles her mother most days. She’s wearing a Ross County football shirt that stretches down to her ankles. Fixes her mother with an accusing stare.