They barely spoke as afternoon turned to evening, as dusk swallowed the last of the day’s light. Once Sara had showered and changed her clothes, she searched the kitchen cupboards for something to dress the wound the car door had left on her shin. She eventually found an open first aid kit among the tools in the extension, and she taped gauze over the cut. That done, she went upstairs to their bed and tunnelled beneath the duvet, hiding there.

She listened to Damien wander the hall and the rooms, the landing, upstairs and downstairs, out into the extension, and back into the original structure of the house. His expensive shoes clicking on stone floors and bare wooden stairs, his phone beeping and chirping, text messages coming and going. He had taken her phone as soon as they entered the house, and she imagined him trawling through her call lists and text messages. Not that he’d find anything.

At one point, he knocked on the door, as if she could refuse him entry.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked.

Sara pushed back the duvet, faced the window, away from him. The darkness surprised her, and she supposed she must have slept at some point.

“No,” she said, even though it was a lie. She would not take food from his hand.

He left her, closing the door over, and she listened as he rattled through the kitchen cupboards searching for food and utensils. He bellowed a string of curses when something clattered to the floor. Eventually, she smelled something burning, followed by more curses and a stretch of silence.

A deeper darkness took her for some time, her slumber haunted by broken dreams of broken children between walls and beneath floors, until she jerked awake with the image of a girl wading through a river, scarlet ribbons spilling from her belly.

As the bedroom reassembled around her, as the world found its axis, she felt Damien’s chest against her back, his arm wrapped around hers.

“You’re awake,” he said.

She closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quiet like a creeping thief. “About what happened last night. About what happened today. All of it. Things are going to get better. I promise. Maybe I’ll get some counselling too. My da was in prison for half of my childhood. That must’ve left some marks on me. If you grew up where I did, you’d understand. We sorted things out with our fists. That’s just the way it was. But I can change. I swear to God, it’ll get better.”

Sara didn’t have the will to argue, to throw his lies back at him, so she lay still and silent within his embrace. As time passed, his breathing steadied and deepened, eventually turning into a grating snore.

Go, she thought. Get out now.