But I saw him at the Holocaust Museum the other week as he pressed his face to the glass, transfixed by the exhibition of clothes and letters and shoes from the Auschwitz death camp. I felt sick just watching him. There was a dark, crackling energy to him, as if he was feeding off the misery and suffering the artefacts represented.

Adults always love Peter, but other kids know better. They can sense there’s something not quite right about him. He rarely brings a schoolfriend home, and when he does, they don’t come back.

Maybe my wife was right after all.

Before we had kids, I never bought into Millie’s genetic curse nonsense. Her parents fucked her up, sure, but underneath all that emotional repression she’s a good person. With her background, she could easily have become an addict, or a drunk, or just married a man like her father and repeated her mother’s mistakes. But despite everything that happened to her, she chooses every day to go out and save lives.

The first time we discussed having a baby I told her: we weren’t like her parents. We’d give our children a stable, loving home. There was no reason our kids shouldn’t turn out perfectly fine. And our daughter was the proof of the pudding: fearless, loving, loyal to a fault, a stickler for fair play. I’d lay down my life for her in a heartbeat.

No, if we’d stopped after Meddie, I wouldn’t have given Millie’s dire prognostications about bad seeds and psychopaths another thought.

I squeeze my daughter’s hand beneath the blanket, my whole being concentrated on a single wordless prayer: please let her be all right please let her be all right please let her be all right.

The worst of it is, this is all my fault.

Harper called me in a panic this morning, insisted we had to meet, wouldn’t tell me what it was about. If it’d been as innocent as I told myself it was, I’d have invited her over to the house instead of arranging to meet her at a restaurant in Chelsea. But the truth is, I didn’t want the kids to see us together.

Didn’t want my wife to know.

Millie’s enough for me. She’s always been enough for me – I literally can’t remember a time in my life without her. And I know her veneer of cool self-sufficiency is just that: a veneer. She’s vulnerable and insecure and fragile, just like the rest of us.

But now and again, it’s nice to be needed. Millie loves me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s never looked up to me. She’s the one with the big job: I make more money than she does, but I’m fiddling with computer codes and she’s holding people’s beating hearts in her hands.