He walked back into the house and locked the back door, looking around him as he tried to figure out what to do next. A niggling doubt tugged at the back of his brain. He walked slowly back down the hallway trying to figure out what it was.

As he reached the still-open front door, the answer came to him. There were no lights on. It would have been dark by the time she called him earlier and, even if she had left the house to take herself to hospital, she wouldn’t have gone around switching off all the lights first, especially not if she was in a rush or in pain. She didn’t tend to turn lights off anyway, and would quite happily leave every light in the house on if they went out in the evening.

With a creeping, sickeningly vivid realization, it dawned on Ben that Bella must have been lying. That she hadn’t even been in the house when she called him. She just wanted to ruin his visit to see Jo and get him back home, where she could carry on making his life a misery and treating him like a slave that she could use and abuse whenever she liked.

He sank down onto the doorstep and put his head in his hands. All the way through the car journey from Suffolk, he had imagined the ways in which his life was going to change from now on. How this experience would have made Bella realize how much she needed him and he had actually visualized her greeting him with open arms and a tearful smile of gratitude.

He had felt bad in the past. Really bad. But nothing compared to the abject humiliation and hurt he was feeling right now. All the blows she had inflicted, all the times she had hurt and abused him were as nothing to the fatal blow she had just delivered. It was like a switch in his brain. He couldn’t even cry any more. He had crossed a threshold of pain and there was no coming back from it.

He looked at his phone, trying to work out what to do. He thought about calling her, but he couldn’t bear to hear her voice, lying to him as easily as breathing. She would come up with some ridiculous explanation for her behaviour but he wasn’t going to let her dupe him again. Not now. Not ever.

He scrolled through his contacts, coming to a halt at the number for Bella’s lover, Leo. He had copied it down the night he had fixed her phone, somehow knowing that he might need it one day. He had absolutely no doubt that that was where she would have been tonight. Where she had called him from, pleading with him to come home and look after her. He pressed on the number before he could change his mind.

‘Leo Fox,’ a deep voice drawled, as the phone was answered.

Ben closed his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. ‘It’s Ben. Ben Gordon.’