‘So I go to the Starbucks on the Uxbridge Road, and I’m retching in the toilet, and I don’t want to call anyone and tell them my dad’s a bastard. And Esther’s only four years older than me, and she puts my little sister to bed every night and reads her stories like she’s her mum. I’m so ashamed it feels like I’m dying, like it’s my sin. And then I think – I have to call Mum. And we’ve been fighting all the time, and I’ve lost her gloves, but now we’re going to need each other. So…’

And then the sobbing overtook me, my body wracked with all of the pain and the betrayal.

‘Sip some more tea,’ said Amber, rubbing my back as I sat up. The group sat in the circle, eyes wide and loving. ‘Tell us what happened next,’ she said once my sobs had subsided. ‘We’re all here for you.’

I lay back down, the room slightly hazy, the woodchip wallpaper moving around like tiny, crawling bugs. Being this emotional, this bare, was a drug all of its own, it turned out.

‘I don’t even have a mobile phone. I have to go to this phone box that tramps piss in and hold my nose and call her. And I tell her, and I’m sobbing, and she tells me to wait, and she’ll come and get me. And then…’

More tears – a torrent that made Hannah’s squalls of emotion from the night before seem like a passing cloud. Arthur’s hands cupped my head again, and for a second I sank into his touch. It was an effort to pull myself back into my story.

‘I was there for two hours! She just left me there. And then she came through the door in this camel coat she had – she was so proud of that fucking coat that autumn – and even though I’d been waiting all that time, I couldn’t be angry, I was just so relieved…’

I paused, and Amber’s soft voice cut in.

‘What happened, Rachel?’

‘I saw her face.’ I was whispering now. ‘It was me she was angry with. It was me who’d done something wrong. How could I say that about Dad? How could I disrespect their marriage? But I knew.’

‘Yes, you did,’ agreed Amber. ‘You knew the truth. And so often the truth-teller is the one that gets cast out.’

‘And I had to live in that house with that stupid little bitch; it was months till she left. And all I wanted to do was get away.’

Amber’s face had relaxed for a while, but now it returned to that furious twist of rage.