‘As much as we can,’ I echoed Aidan’s words. ‘And then no questions.’

He nodded. I saw his eyes shining in the dimness of the unlit room and knew how much it meant to him that I’d said yes. My fear was still there, sitting hunched inside me, but now I felt better able to manage it. I’d secured a concession: no questions. I was in control, I told myself.

‘I did something stupid. More than stupid. Wrong.’ My voice sounded too loud, so I lowered it. ‘To two people.’ Saying their names would have been impossible. I didn’t try. Even in my thoughts I cannot name them. I make do with ‘Him’ and ‘Her’.

I knew then that I was capable of giving Aidan no more than the bare bones, though every word of the whole of it glowed in my mind. Nobody would believe how often I tell myself the story, one unbearable detail after another. Like picking at a scab, except it’s not. It’s more like taking a sharp fingernail and gouging out raw, runny pink flesh from a spot I’ve never left alone long enough for a scab to form.

I did something wrong. I keep hoping I’ll find a new way to start, at the same time as knowing there isn’t one. None of it would have happened if I’d been blameless.

‘It was a long time ago. I was punished.’ My head throbbed, as if a small, hard machine was rotating inside my brain. ‘Excessively. I never . . . I still haven’t got over it. The unfairness of it and . . . what happened to me. I thought I could escape by moving away, but . . .’ I shrugged, trying to affect an equanimity I did not feel.

‘The worst things stow away in the hold, follow you wherever you go,’ said Aidan.

His kindness made it harder. I shook my hands free from his and sat down on the edge of the bed. The room we’d booked was awful: it had the tall, narrow proportions of a telephone box, and there were green and blue checks everywhere—the curtains, the bedspread, the chairs—with a grid of red lines separating each square from its neighbours. When I stared at the pattern, it warped in front of my eyes. I didn’t need to see all the other rooms in the Drummond Hotel to know they were identical. There were three pictures, one above the television and two on the hollow wall that separated the bedroom from the bathroom; three insipid landscapes that begged to be ignored, with colours that were as close to colourless as it was possible to get. Outside, through the thick, rectangular slab of multi-layered glass that made up one side of the room, London was a restless yellow-streaked grey that I knew would keep me awake all night. I wanted to be in the pitch black, blind and unseen.

Why was I bothering with this pretence of a confession? What was the point of telling the only version of events that I could bear to utter out loud—an abstract shadow, a template that could have applied to any number of stories?