I was careful not to meet her eyes. We both knew the truth about that.

“The funeral will be on Monday,” she said. “We had to wait for the results to come in before they’d release the body.” I saw her swallow. “Tom died from the bang on his head, when he hit it on the tiles. There was a laceration at the back of his scalp where it had hit the floor and his skull was fractured.” She stopped suddenly and looked down at her drink. I kept quiet. “He’d broken some ribs in the fall, too, and a couple of vertebrae were shattered in his lower back.” She took out a tissue and rubbed her eyes. “There was a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream. Three times the drunk-driving limit. He must have been drinking all day.”

I thought back to that afternoon when I’d kneeled next to him to see whether he was alive. I hadn’t consciously noticed it at that point but late that night Harry had slipped into bed beside me when he got back from London. He’d had a couple of drinks on the train with one of the guys from work, and when he leaned over to kiss me, his breath had smelled just the same as Tom’s had. I’d jumped out of bed and run to the bathroom. I shuddered at the memory. “Did he normally drink a lot?”

“He did, yeah. He said it relaxed him. It didn’t relax me, though. I’d be on tenterhooks wondering what fresh argument he’d come up with.”

I saw a look on her face then as she remembered. For a moment I forgot what she’d done to me and reached out to touch her arm. “Did he hurt you? Was he violent?”

She was quiet for a long time. Her face was pale, her eyes lowered. “When I lived with Tom there was always a threat in the air that was horrible to live with. He never hit me, but he hurt me in every other way you can hurt someone.”

I winced.

“It left me not trusting people. Anyone. I became hypervigilant. And”—her voice faltered—“not quite whole. For a while I felt as though I didn’t exist.”

I knew, I just knew what had rescued her. Who had rescued her. I had to change the subject fast. “Did you realize he’d drunk so much that day?”