Clodagh sat down, looked at the screen. There were five files in a folder labelled ‘Adam’. Four Word documents and one image file. The name of each document followed the same format: a surname and the name of a newspaper. Clodagh recognised one of the surnames, McLean. The tabloid journalist who’d been harassing her recently. She clicked on the first file, waited for it to open. It was a draft of an email, she realised, addressed to a journalist at The Sun newspaper. She had to read it twice before the meaning sunk in. When she was finished, she opened the next document. Another draft email. She read this one and moved onto the next.

When she’d finished reading all four documents, she opened the image file.

At first, she didn’t know what she was looking at. A white expanse of skin, four purple elongated circles. Bruises. She was looking at a wrist with a ring of bruises around it.

Her mouth was dry. She tried swallowing, but it made no difference. The feelings of confusion and horror mixed with an aching nostalgia to hear her sister’s voice one final time. Not her voice when she was acting, because Clodagh could hear that anytime she wanted by watching one of Vivienne’s films, but her real voice. Because Clodagh knew, if she could just speak to Vivienne, there’d be a logical explanation for what she was looking at.

‘I don’t understand.’ She pushed the laptop away and stood up, unable to bear sitting there a second longer. ‘Those emails, what she’s written, it’s not true. It can’t be.’

Words from the emails jumped around inside her head. Abusive. Coercive control. Violence. The image of the wrist was stuck to the inside of her eyes. Not just any wrist, her sister’s wrist.

‘I know it’s a shock,’ Bella said, ‘that’s why I drove over. Because I needed to know if you were okay. Men like that don’t change overnight. Is that why you’ve decided to leave him? Because he’s been doing it to you too?’

‘No.’ Clodagh’s stomach twisted, the bitter taste of bile at the back of her throat. ‘We don’t even know Vivienne wrote those emails.’

But the words rang false and she didn’t blame Bella for the pitying way she was looking at her. Like Clodagh was a poor, deluded fool. She tried to remember if there’d been any signs, going back over the times she’d met Vivienne during that period. There’d been an underlying restlessness, maybe. A few times Vivienne had drunk too much. But neither of those things were unusual and Clodagh had barely given them a second thought.

‘You think she was planning to leave him?’ Bella said.

‘I don’t know.’

She couldn’t sort through the different thoughts, all jostling for attention but none of them making any sense.