Katy’s just telling me how he still liked to sleep with her and, afterwards, as he got dressed, joked that she was an eight out of ten this time, try harder next time. Except it didn’t seem like a joke. I ask her if he ever hurt her. She said he didn’t, but her eyes betrayed her. She said it was playing, like in Fifty Shades.

She told me that he did all this when Jamie was there, but he fitted a lock to his bedroom door so that when you were having ‘Daddy time with Mummy’ Jamie would stay in his room. That she could hear him crying. That she’d asked Jack to stop, but every time she asked things got worse. He made her feel like shit. He ‘suggested’ that Jamie should come to stay for ‘two weeks or a month’. That Missy was his Nana and he loved her.

So she carried on sleeping with him. She got pregnant again and told him, but he simply opened his wallet and gave her 500 pounds to ‘get rid of it’. Then, when she did, he resumed sleeping with her. And she was only doing it because she thought he would come back in the end and that they would be a family, like he promised. That she knew how stupid that sounded now, but then, in her tired, hormonal, confused state, it seemed real.

I listen attentively, because these are the things that I have never wanted to say, I’ve never had the strength. These are the things that happened to me too. Private things between me and him, so horrible that I couldn’t articulate them and now, when I think about them, even to me they don’t seem real. But I have the strength now. For me and Katy.

When she’s finished she’s breathless. Neither of us cries. I simply say, ‘He did that to me too.’

I know we’ll be friends for life now. What I didn’t know was that DS Percy was standing behind me.

Chapter Thirty-two

She’s been listening since Katy began to tell me that Jack carried on sleeping with her. I heard fucking Rover but I didn’t realise we’d left the door open. She’s here with another policewoman and she coughs gently. Katy jumps.

‘Sorry. We didn’t mean to scare you.’

Katy stands up quickly, but I am calm.

‘Come in. Have a seat. What can I do for you now?’ I can hear the sharpness in my voice from Katy vocalising my deepest hurt, and I try to swallow it down. She’s staring at Katy. ‘This is Katy Squires.’

Katy extends her hand.

‘We spoke on the phone. You told me to …’

DS Percy sits down in front of me. She looks very tired. Her nails are bitten to the quick.

‘Yes. Yet here you are.’

I interject.

‘We’re here for each other now.’