It went on and on. She became fatter and fatter. And the bigger she became, the angrier his rages and the smaller she felt inside, until she eventually felt like nothing, a speck of dirt on the floor, insignificant and pathetic and weak. The laughter stopped. It was hard to look Mark in his charming, handsome face any more. His muscular body had stopped being something to lust after, becoming instead something to fear, to cower away from whenever he moved unexpectedly.

‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ she had said brokenly to the police officers in the hospital, tears running down her swollen cheeks until they pooled damply in the bandages that cradled her smashed jaw. Except – if she was being honest – in the dark, wild heat of the moment, she had meant to do it, when he punched her face so hard they both heard a crack and one of her teeth fell out, shining and bloodied on the kitchen floor. Hell yes, she meant to do it all right, as she grabbed the kitchen knife with its natty red handle and plunged it into his side. A Kitchen Devil, it was called; she remembered thinking later that that was a good description of her own self at that very moment. A kitchen banshee, screaming insults back at him, her hands sodden with his splashing crimson blood. That jolt of satisfaction at seeing the shocked look on his face at what she’d done. There. See how YOU like it.

‘He just kept on hitting me,’ she’d explained, her voice so tiny that the police officer who was jotting down her words in a notepad had to lean closer to hear. ‘I thought he was going to kill me this time.’

But he hadn’t managed that at least. The neighbours must have heard her screaming because they’d called the police, although she couldn’t remember any of that: the ambulance journey, his arrest, nothing. For six weeks she’d remained in hospital, being patched and stitched and splinted, off her head with strong painkillers most of the time, but safe from him at least. Safe from harm. Those six long weeks had passed, one after another, while she thought and she pondered and she made a few decisions. Meanwhile, pound by pound, the weight was already beginning to drop silently off her as she lay there recovering.