I sometimes wonder why Leon can’t see it from my side, especially after everything I’ve been through. He knows that this is more than just a job to me; that it’s my life’s work to save everyone I can from situations they don’t deserve to be in. But, like my clients say, ‘You’ll never understand what it feels like to be in that position until you’ve been there yourself.’ Little do they know that I have, and Leon would do well to remember that every once in a while.

Perhaps then, I wouldn’t feel the need to keep things from him; to hide the fact that I got Melanie Langley pushed up the emergency rehousing list, by agreeing to take on three Women’s Aid cases in return. Or that I voluntarily man the Domestic Abuse national helpline one afternoon a week.

He can’t understand why, when I’ve come from where I have, I would want to take myself back there, through someone else’s experience. But that’s exactly why I do it. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing, any more than Santa Claus could stay at home on Christmas Eve.

‘I just want to be able to protect you,’ Leon had said to me after my run-in with Sarah’s husband. ‘You can’t chase all the monsters away. You’ve put paid to your own – he will never darken your door again – but you can’t save everyone.’

But couldn’t I at least try?

Though now, as I sift through the disarray of paperwork on the dining table, seeing no sign of Jacob’s case file, I can’t help but wonder if he was right after all.

Could Jacob’s wife be so driven to know where he is that she’d come to my office and steal his file? It’s unlikely; she doesn’t know I even feature in her husband’s life, least of all that I’ve been privy to everything that she’s done to him.

Whenever he came to see me, he had gone to painstaking lengths to get here without been seen or followed. He always made sure to leave the school by the back door and had taken two buses, so as not to move his car from its prominent parking space in front of the assembly hall.

He’d leave his phone at work too, so that she couldn’t track him, because as soon as he was on the move and going in any direction, she’d be calling him, asking where he was going. He couldn’t even go to get a sandwich without her questioning him, so there was no way he was going to let her find out he was seeing me.