‘The thing I’ll miss is his warmth when it was good,’ Beatrice said. She didn’t talk about the abuse, even though it was a battered-wives’ meeting: she’d rather talk about how great he was. Maisie felt a little sick. Sorry, Fred, this isn’t for me. She got up to leave.

‘Don’t go yet,’ Julia, the counsellor, said.

‘I’ve left the kids with my mother.’

‘Just stay the hour.’

Maisie didn’t like to make a fuss so she sat and all eyes were now on her.

‘Tell us what you’ll miss most, Maisie,’ Julia said.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all?’ Julia asked. But that was all Maisie would say that night. After another woman talked about finally having had enough and bashing her husband’s skull in with a frying-pan (he’d survived but suffered a serious concussion and ringing in his left ear), she felt a little better about the group and returned on and off for a year. She knew everyone there by the time she confessed to hating her husband from first sight. She even mentioned the article she’d read on date-rape and admitted that that was what had happened with Danny.

The room was silent until Beatrice mumbled, ‘Sweet suffering Jesus.’

‘Ah, no,’ someone said. She wasn’t sure who had spoken because she was staring at her shoes at the time. She immediately worried that she’d said too much but it had felt good to get it out. She couldn’t talk about sex with her ma, and back then, aside from Lynn, she’d had no real friends left. Danny had seen to that. She’d never told Lynn about the rape – not because she didn’t trust her but because she feared that Lynn would never understand how Maisie had walked into a marriage with a rapist. She didn’t understand it herself.

Julia and the group were instrumental in giving Maisie back some confidence. That first night Julia shook Maisie’s hand and congratulated her.

‘For what?’ Maisie said.

‘Having the courage to get out.’

‘I should have done it a long time ago.’

‘You’ve done it now, and you’ll never have to experience that dread again.’

Maisie smiled at her. ‘That would be nice.’ She knew the dread Julia meant: she’d felt it every time her husband had put his key in the door. Even after she’d escaped she felt it – that time she’d seen him on the street or when he’d walked up her mother’s driveway to bang on the door and she’d thought he’d break in and kill them all. Then, one day out of nowhere, he’d packed up his job and left. It was three months before she stopped holding her breath and the dread lifted. In the years since she had almost forgotten how intense and crippling it was.