‘Hey.’ Sharon’s arrival made him jump. Her voice seemed strained, but still instantly recognisable to him from across the bed – as it should be after fifteen years of marriage. Long-suffering, she would be called if he was to believe what he’d heard recently. He could hardly argue. They’d had tough times: extra-marital affairs, addictions, depression – all his. But they had come through every one. He might have accepted that his marriage was going to fail at some point, that he was going to be out of the family home, but he had always assumed that it would be down to something he had done, his fault, which would also make it something he might be able to fix. Instead something else had torn them apart. Someone else. The stranger who had silently manipulated and abused his daughter, the stranger who had forced her into a desperation so strong that she would seek to take her own life with a handful of painkillers. Painkillers. He hadn’t even been able to say the word out loud. The doctors had also detected a toxic amount of Paracetamol in her system. They suggested this might have been her first choice to effectively overdose but explained that it could take time and she might have lost patience. He could barely imagine what could have left her feeling so desperate. There had been a police investigation; Callie was a victim of online grooming, she had been blackmailed to send pictures. It had all come out a few weeks before she had tried to take her own life. Callie wasn’t the only victim – a number of her friends were involved too. It was a difficult time, of course it was, but he had no idea just how huge the impact had been on her. His confident, popular, sassy daughter – reduced to this. Being kept alive by a series of tubes.

He assumed the police investigation would ramp up when Callie was rushed in but all they could provide was more questions than answers. Still there were lots of missing pieces. The name of her abuser being the most obvious; a sense of justice was another.

Danny kept hold of his daughter’s hand as he greeted his wife. ‘I didn’t think you came in this early?’ he said.

Sharon was carrying coffee, the brand matching what he had passed at the entrance.

‘Well, I was able to get the school run taken off my hands, so I thought …’

‘You thought what?’ She had two cups: Danny was now aware that she had come here with the intention of speaking to him after weeks of doing anything to avoid it.

‘Marty told me you were heading over after your meeting so I had an idea of what time you might be here.’ She put one of the cups down on the table at the end of Callie’s bed, pushing it an inch towards him.