He sparks his lighter and the scent of burning tobacco fills the air. “As I grew up, I became your quintessential bastard. I adored the chase, but the second a woman started caring about me or putting pressure on me to emotionally commit, I was off. Sometimes they refused to let me go, and then I’d have to get cruel.” He pauses and looks at Isis, who nods thoughtfully. “I didn’t want anyone to care for me. I didn’t need looking after or saving or loving. Fuck that shit.”

Isaac cranes back his neck and blows a long stream of smoke up towards the ceiling. He rocks back ever so slightly on his tailbone then looks at us. “I thought I was protecting myself by not letting anyone get close. I thought I was stopping myself from getting hurt, but I was actually making things worse. I was screwing myself up.” He shrugs. “And then I met this lot” – he looks at Isis again – “while I was travelling, and I figured some stuff out. I went to India, I studied with yogis, I learned to let go.”

I’m suddenly aware that what he’s saying is having an effect on Daisy. Her eyes are trained on his face but her hands are fidgeting in her lap, her fingers pulling and twisting at the tassels on her skirt. I know she’s thinking about her mum and sister. Isaac wasn’t the only one who had a shit childhood.

“How?” she says. Her voice sounds unnaturally high and strained. “How did you let go?”

Isaac smiles. “You want an easy solution, don’t you, Daisy? You want me to say ‘chant this meditation’, ‘get this massage’, ‘visit this temple’ and all your shit will go away.”

“No.” Daisy pulls a face; she looks awkward, embarrassed. “I don’t want you to do anything apart from answer my question.”

“Touché!” He laughs and the atmosphere in the room lifts. “Okay, I’ll tell you what did it. I opened up and started talking. About everything, to anyone who’d listen, every dirty little detail. Every filthy fucked up secret I’d kept to myself for twenty-four years. I thought that, by keeping it to myself, by blocking it out and pretending it hadn’t happened, I was stronger than the abuse my stepfather had inflicted on me. But I wasn’t. I was its slave. I was carrying it around with me everywhere like a monkey on my back, and it affected everything I did, everything I said and everyone I met. So I put my shit out there – I put it all out there – and when I did, it didn’t have the strength to hurt me any more.”

“So – what – now you don’t treat women like shit any more?” The vulnerability has disappeared from Daisy’s voice and her normal confident, scathing tone has returned.