‘But you’re still in danger,’ I say. ‘She’s still hounding you, still threatening you.’

‘Can we not talk about her?’ he says, sounding exasperated. ‘For just a second?’

I look at him, wondering what else we’d talk about if not her. It’s always been her; that’s what he pays me for.

But he’s not paying you now, is he? asks the voice in my head.

‘What about you?’ he asks, making anxious butterflies flutter in my chest. ‘You know everything about me, there’s no stone unturned, yet I know absolutely nothing about you, aside from that you’re married to Leon. Tell me about you.’

My mouth dries up and my heartbeat quickens as the four words reverberate around my head. Tell me about you.

I remember going to interviews for various secretarial jobs when I left college, and all the time I was able to tell the prospective employer about the things I could do for them; my typing speed of seventy words per minute, the benefit of shorthand in a world which had rendered it obsolete, and my ability to work well within a team. I was able to wax lyrical. But the nail in the coffin would always be the excruciating pause that followed the question, Tell me about yourself.

You would have thought I’d have perfected a polished response over time. Been able to spin a yarn about my idyllic upbringing, living with my parents and little sister out on Long Island. Going to the local high school and excelling in Math and English. Wanting to be a professor of medicine because that’s what my mother had always dreamt of being, and I so wanted to make her proud.

But that’s where my story faltered because I knew what was coming. I’d start to stutter, trip over my well-rehearsed lines, knowing that I was lying by omitting to mention the single biggest event that had shaped my life up until that point.

Maybe if I’d told them that my father was in jail, serving a life sentence, I would have got the job. At least they’d know I was honest, if nothing else. But somehow, I hadn’t quite got used to sharing that particular piece of information.

Nor was I able to tell them why he was inside because then I’d never regain my composure.

So instead I invented a persona that nothing of any consequence had ever happened to, and my default position of claiming to be uninteresting has served me well over the years. Until someone like Jacob comes along.

‘There’s not much to tell really,’ I offer.

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘You’re an American woman in London, for starters – well, as good as.’