On the day her first son, Seb, turned three, the door to the basement had opened and he – the man whose name she still did not know and whom she thought of only as ‘the man’ – had come in. Unsmiling, as usual, but with a nervousness which was new.

He had said it was time Seb left. Time to let him go.

But not her. She was staying here.

She did not believe the man. What would he do with Seb? How would he explain the sudden appearance of a three-year-old in his life?

He was not going to set him free at all.

So she refused, but the man took him anyway. Quickly, and brutally. She barely had time to resist.

It was the last time she saw her firstborn. The next time the man came to the room he was alone.

She asked for Seb hundreds – thousands, maybe – of times, but he just shook his head, refusing to say where her boy was. Once, he told her, Don’t worry, he’s safe, but she didn’t believe it. If a three-year-old boy had suddenly appeared in his life, people would have asked where the child came from, who the mother was. There was no way he wanted those questions, so she thought she knew what had happened.

The man had made the problem disappear.

He’d taken her little boy and killed him, then disposed of his body somewhere it would never be found.

Beside herself with grief, she’d lost weight – a lot of weight, enough that her skin grew loose and she could almost see the shape of the bones in her arms and legs – but it didn’t stop the man coming to the basement and gesturing to the bed in the corner with that curt little nod of his, then waiting for her to lie down and undress before he lay on top of her and did what he did while she closed her eyes and waited for it to be over and for him to be back upstairs in his house where she didn’t have to look at him.

And, of course, the thing she had feared most came to pass. Another child. She tried to stop it. Tried to starve the baby to death inside her, but all that happened was she grew thinner and thinner herself until the man figured out what was going on and forced her to eat. Why, she didn’t know. Why he wanted the baby to be born was a mystery to her, but then most of what he did was a mystery to her. How could you understand a man who locked a fifteen-year-old girl in a basement for years, then stole her son? Why even try?