I almost stop breathing. I’m trying to fix my focus on Anna’s mouth which is still moving, but millions of tiny white dots are floating in front of my eyes, making me feel dizzy.

I must have imagined it. She couldn’t have said what I think she said, yet her words are resounding in my head as if they’re coming from a megaphone.

‘You were probably too young to remember,’ she’s saying, through the wall of cotton wool that my defence mechanism is quickly attempting to build. ‘But I vividly remember this horrific case and asking myself why that woman didn’t get out when she had the chance. To save herself. To save her children.’

I suck in air that seems to be in short supply and Anna looks at me with a concerned expression.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

A sudden flash of the courtroom dazzles me and I’m back in the witness box, being interrogated by my father’s lawyer.

‘So that night, when your mom was dragged from the bed you were both lying on, what did you do?’ he’d asked.

‘I-I waited a while,’ I’d stuttered. ‘And when she started screaming, I ran into the kitchen.’

‘And when you got there, you saw your mom with a knife in her hand,’ said the lawyer, circling the courtroom floor as if he were performing in a high-brow play off Broadway.

My mouth had instantaneously dried up. I went to speak, but nothing came out, like when you’re trapped in a nightmare and want to scream but there’s no sound.

‘Could you please speak up?’ the lawyer had pushed, in an effort to intimidate me even more than I already was.

I cleared my throat. ‘N-no, she didn’t have the knife.’

The lawyer had looked momentarily perplexed, as if I was playing some kind of a joke on him.

‘OK,’ he’d said patronizingly, as if he’d decided to play along. ‘So where was the knife when you walked in?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think it was on the side.’

‘You don’t know,’ he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard the second half of the sentence.

‘It was on the side,’ I said more concisely, leaning into the microphone.

‘And where was your mother?’

I looked at my father, sitting there in his best three-piece suit, the one he saved for church on the odd occasion he went to repent his sins.

‘She was bent over,’ I said. ‘He had her by the hair and was kneeing her in her stomach.’

‘OK, so she picked up the knife to stop him from hurting her any further?’ said the lawyer, putting words in my mouth.

‘No,’ I said, not wanting to say what happened next, but knowing that I had to. ‘I picked up the knife.’

The lawyer had looked from me to my father and back again.