There’s a sudden silence in the car. Something passes between us: a moment of shared recognition that knits us together like bone. Motherhood means living simultaneously in joy and desperation. When I got pregnant with Meddie, my biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to love her. It never occurred to me that loving her too much would be what nearly crushed me.

‘They’d survive,’ I say gently, ‘if anything happened to you. Children are resilient. You and I are living proof of that.’

‘I want my boys to do more than just survive.’

‘I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Harper.’

‘You can’t make promises like that. Stacey tried to kill me.’

‘Did she?’ I say quietly. ‘Or did you just need a reason not to go home?’

The lights change and I turn onto the Fulham Road, overtaking a black cab stopping for a fare and slotting neatly behind a bus. The taxi driver gives me the finger.

‘You don’t believe me,’ Harper says flatly.

I feel a brief, unexpected flicker of regret as the moment of understanding between us breaks and we retreat to our own sides of the divide.

‘You lied to me before,’ I say. ‘You said you didn’t know who was in the car that hit you. You only told me it was Stacey when I said it was time for you to go home.’

‘It was Stacey,’ she says.

‘Then I believe you. Stop talking and put the address in the sat-nav,’ I say. ‘We don’t have much time.’

Stacey isn’t going to sit on her hands and wait to see how things play out. She knows that without a body the police don’t have enough to charge me, or they’d have done it already. She has to box me into a corner from which there’s no coming back.

Gambling is in my nature. And it’s in Stacey’s, too. Neither of us is in the habit of playing it safe. We both have incriminating video of each other: in theory, our mutually assured destruction should keep us both safe. But I guarantee she’ll roll the dice anyway and give the police the CCTV footage of me breaking into her house and her husband’s office, calculating I’ll be arrested before I have a chance to mount an attack. It’s what I’d do.

She never needed the house deeds, of course. It was a set-up to give her video that’d make me look guilty, and it was a brilliant move. I was so invested in her domestic abuse narrative I never stopped to question why she needed the deeds so urgently. I didn’t question anything. Even when I hacked into Felix’s desktop camera I was trying to find something that’d help her.