But as soon as he touched her skin, pressed his mouth to her young lips, his palm to her breast, he’d felt her flinch and pull away. He had known as clearly as he knew his own name that she did not want this, did not want him. And a switch went in his brain as he scrabbled to have as much of her as he could before she got away – something he remembered now with crippling shame. As he forced himself on her, her legs awkwardly splayed and pinioned beneath his body, her red dress rucked up, her breath jagged in his ear, he’d heard her whimpering, like the child she was.

It was then that the phone rang. It was a client, persistent and slightly unhinged, whom he quickly brushed off. But Grace had taken her chance and gone, thank goodness. Five minutes, maybe less, it was, since he had first laid his hand on the girl’s bare thigh. But in that brief flash of time, he had done something totally inconceivable, an act of violence that it was impossible for him even to contemplate owning. Indeed, to this day, he could barely articulate his guilt.

That night, as he’d sat sweating and shaking, gasping for breath on the sofa in his rooms, he’d already found himself beginning to refute, to bury, to rewrite and smooth the edges of what had happened between him and the girl. It wasn’t him. He couldn’t have done it. So when he arrived at James’s house, and his friend had asked him if he’d raped her, he had denied it with an almost fervent belief that it was impossible for him to have done so. But he had been that close. If the phone hadn’t rung …

James had seemed to think that as long as it wasn’t actual rape, it wasn’t too serious. Which Michael knew was utterly wrong – and if he’d been in any doubt, the shocked and frightened expression in Grace’s eyes, the way she flinched as he grabbed at her and began to kiss her made it clear enough. The revulsion in Romy’s eyes made it clear, too – if he really needed to be told.

Michael had never stopped regretting that night. When he realized, as the weeks passed, that Grace might not speak up, he had determinedly buried the whole incident as best he could. But it haunted him, nonetheless. It drove him to work even harder, and, little by little, to take small steps away from Romy and the boys. Work was the only thing that blocked Grace’s tear-stained face from his thoughts. But gradually, over the years, the images receded, the deed lodging in the dark pit of his consciousness, like a warning flag that occasionally caught his eye – until the letter.