He pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and GBH. He admitted to drugging me with Clonazepam and tying me up, but would say nothing about his reasons for doing either. Though she was the one who’d done the damage, he was still guilty of GBH by law because he was ‘more than ancillary’ to her attack on me. He admitted to knowing in advance what she’d planned to do, though her plan had contained only the throwing of the stones, in accordance with the punishment, under Sharia law, for adultery. Making me eat the gravel had been an improvisation on her part.

After that one moment of weakness in which she saved my life with her phone call to the police, she became herself again. She pleaded not guilty, against the advice of her legal team, claiming he had done it all and she’d had nothing to do with it, hadn’t even known about it.

Once I’d recovered and was let out of hospital, all I wanted was to put it behind me insofar as that was possible. I can’t remember at what point I realised that the people who were supposedly on my side were trying to force a whole new ordeal upon me, one I didn’t have the stamina for: a court case, publicity. I was told I wouldn’t be able to stop the papers printing my name because there had been no sexual element to the attack. I refused to talk to the press, so they presented her version of the story as fact: I had been sleeping with her boyfriend and she’d stoned me as a punishment. In court, under cross-examination, she emphasised more than once that I was an adulteress and had deserved it, even though she stuck to her story that it was he who had done the stoning, not her. The jury didn’t believe her. Everyone could see she was proud of what she’d done.

I don’t know what he told her. I can’t see why he’d say we’d had sex when we hadn’t—what good would that do him? My guess is that he told her the truth but she didn’t believe him, or she believed him but chose to pretend she didn’t. After all, the more grave my offence, the more justified her response. I can’t prove it, obviously, but I don’t think she was punishing me for sleeping with her boyfriend, whatever she said in court. She was punishing me for the terror she’d experienced when she found out I was waging a campaign to split them up. Maybe they had a fight and he told her he was leaving her for me, and in a moment of ragged, uncontrollable horror, she saw herself disintegrating without him. A person can lose everything that makes them who they are in a moment like that.