He kept the door to the bedroom he’d put her in locked, but it was a comfortable room, and he brought her food and drink and let her go to the toilet. She kept waiting for him to try to have sex with her, but he didn’t. A couple of times, when she’d tried to escape, he had hit her. As soon as he saw she was hurt, he had started crying.

That, she was all too familiar with. The lashing out, then the apologies.

A tiny voice inside told her that what was happening with this man was different. She’d loved Steve and wanted to help him. In the beginning, at least.

Her sister Barbara had thought she was nuts. But Barbara was young. She didn’t understand that in real life, relationships are never perfect. Pauline worked in a doctor’s surgery. She’d seen plenty of women come in wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day to cover the black eyes. They were usually there to get a prescription for valium – not have their injuries seen to. She wasn’t alone. In real life, men hit women. There were only six years between Pauline and her younger sister, but they were a lifetime apart in worldly experience. Pauline had seen their father hit their mam. Barbara hadn’t, or at least had no recollection of it. She would lecture Pauline on women’s rights, about ‘domestic violence’ and ‘suffering in silence’ being a thing of the past – as though every man bar Steve was a saint.

And it was easy for her sister to ignore the nice side of Steve, something Pauline couldn’t do. Yes, there were bad times, but there were also moments of pure joy – when they were happy, and he was tender and loving and she was the centre of his universe. Sometimes, she thought she could take the worse bits, just to keep hold of that.

Pauline wasn’t a complete idiot. As time went on, it was obvious Steve was getting more vicious and that the only change she would ever see in him was for the worse. She knew then that she’d have to leave him eventually. She couldn’t help him.

But this man, her kidnapper, was a complete stranger. She didn’t know where to begin to make him feel better. And it wasn’t her responsibility to do so.

She hated him for taking her, especially when she’d been just on the cusp of freedom from this sort of life. Who needed men anyway? Barbara would have had the baby by now and Pauline’s time would be taken up helping her care for him. It didn’t matter how nice this bloody bedroom was or that her kidnapper was less violent than Steve – it was still a cell and he was still a man who was abusing her.