I look up and see our reflection in the window, Tom’s arm looped loosely across my neck. And I’m suddenly, unexpectedly, assailed by a memory of my mother at the kitchen sink, my father behind her just as Tom is now.

But my father’s embrace isn’t affectionate.

I don’t know how old I was: in my memory, my eyes are level with the top of the kitchen island, so perhaps four or five. Five, I must have been five: my mother was pregnant with my sister, Gracie.

My father’s hands are around my mother’s throat.

He’s forcing her head down into the sink, which is full of greasy water. She’s coughing and gasping, fighting for air. Her arms flail impotently, unable to reach him. She’s drowning.

I despised my mother, even at the age of five. I despised her for her weakness: not her physical inability to stand up to him – she was only five foot two and a hundred pounds lighter than he, and pregnancy made her even more vulnerable – but for willingly ceding him her power in return for the ring on her finger. She was a beautiful woman, a smart woman. As young as I was, I could see she had other weapons in her arsenal. She could have made him love her. She could have made him love me.

I wasn’t weak like my mother.

So I picked up the paring knife she’d been using to prepare dinner, and plunged it into the back of my father’s bare leg.

I couldn’t have known where to cut to cause maximum damage, of course. I was five. And yet instinctively I avoided the big muscles of the thigh or calf: he’d brush off the slender paring knife like he was swatting a mosquito. Instead, I went for the vulnerable point between the joints of his knee. I sliced straight through the posterior cruciate ligament and severed the popliteal artery, though of course it’d be years before I learned what they were called. Had my mother not called an ambulance, my father would have bled out on the kitchen floor.

She never thanked me. On the contrary: she blamed me for making his vicious temper worse because of his chronic knee pain.

Perhaps she was right. Violence is never the answer, of course.

Until it’s the only option.

chapter 16

millie

Stacey’s yellow Mini convertible pulls up opposite the gates of the Hurlingham Club. The top is down, and she waves at me over the sun visor.

‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry I’m late,’ she calls, as I cross the road to meet her. ‘I got caught up at work. Have you been waiting long?’

‘Two minutes,’ I say.

She flings open the passenger door. ‘Get in. I’ll drive us to the clubhouse.’