As the van rattled around her, and the hedgerows whipped past, Sara wondered when she’d last sat alone in a vehicle with a man other than her husband. She searched her memory and could not recall a single occasion since their wedding. Not even a taxi. They had been married a little over two years, been a couple twice as long before that. Damien had overwhelmed her with his charm, his love, the intensity of that first year of their relationship seeming now like a strange dream. She had never known anything like it, nor anyone like him. They moved in together when she graduated university and started work for Bath Community Health and Care Services as a child protection officer. And for another year, she was happy. They both were.

Their first real argument came after a dinner party they had attended, a reunion of Damien’s university friends. They seemed to regard Damien as somehow exotic, not just because of his accent, but because they knew his father had been imprisoned. Oliver, the host, the son of a Labour MP, found him particularly fascinating, enraptured by tales of the armed struggle back in Ireland. They had been seated around the table, boy-girl-boy-girl, separated from their respective partners. Damien sat diagonally across from Sara. By the end of the evening, she couldn’t remember the name of the man who had been seated next to her, only that he had been drunk and she’d had to remove his hand from her thigh at least three times.

She had noticed Damien was quiet on the taxi ride back to their flat, and that he barely spoke as they readied for bed. Asking him what was wrong had been her mistake.

“You really don’t know?” he had said, sitting on the edge of their bed, watching her slip into her pyjamas.

“No,” she had replied, truthfully, feeling the haze of alcohol lift as her senses sharpened to the danger. She pulled a cleansing wipe from the packet on the dressing table, sat on the opposite side of the bed, and began removing her make-up.

“You and Craig were all over each other,” he said, his back to her.

“Ah, Craig, that’s it, I couldn’t remember his name. Wasn’t he in your—”

“You let him feel you up all evening.”

“What? I didn’t let him do anything. He was a bit handsy, but I—”

“A bit handsy? You might as well have fucked him on the table.”

The cold blades of his words cut at her. “That’s not fair,” she said. “It was nothing like that. He was drunk, and his hands were wandering, but I kept them off.”

“What do you expect, tarted up like that?” he asked, turning to leer at her.

Sara looked down at the wipe in her hand, the make-up smeared on it. “You can’t blame me for his behaviour.”