Beth was crying properly now. Childish sobs wracked her chest. She wanted Eva to come back. She wanted Corinne to stop looking at her in that way. Bruno spoke, his impatience and disgust there in the rattling string of words she couldn’t understand, and Corinne snapped at him to just wait. But the squalor of the room and the recklessness of Beth’s mistake all rose up and overwhelmed her.

‘Please,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I can’t. I know I should. I know you want me to, but I just can’t.’

She pulled her wrist from Corinne’s grasp and sat down heavily on the couch, her arms held protectively around her, refusing to meet her friend’s gaze. But she felt Corinne’s glare, her silent fury. A single moment of silence, and then Corinne stood up, moving swiftly past Beth, almost stepping on her feet. She said something to Bruno, and Beth could tell from her aloof tone and the way Bruno sniggered that it was something disparaging about Beth. And when the bedroom door closed behind them, leaving Beth alone on the couch, a wave of self-disgust washed over her so strongly, it might have obliterated her completely.

In the silence that followed, she rocked herself gently back and forth, trying to calm the storm of emotions inside. Corinne was right, she thought. She was a baby. A child needing a push. And how could she not have understood what would be demanded of her in exchange for the tattoo? Furiously, she raked back over the events in her mind, starting with Corinne’s suggestion that first time of turning the scar into something notable – something beautiful – and then to the meeting with Bruno outside the Proxi one evening, the negotiations carried out by Corinne in French, Beth smiling shyly up at him in the sunlight. Pushing aside any thoughts of collusion, she trawled instead through memories of conversations that had followed, seeking out clues she’d missed at the time. Her naivety appalled her. Of course he would expect something in return – hadn’t Corinne said as much? So what if she hadn’t been explicit? To do so would have been coarse, and Corinne was not like that. Outspoken, yes, with a mischievous streak running through her. But she was not vulgar or crude. And she only wanted what was best for Beth. Hadn’t she said as much? Let me help you, she’d offered, and Beth had accepted. So, wasn’t this as much Beth’s fault as Corinne’s?