Tom thinks it’s a good thing the Porters have pulled out. Peter needs stability, he says. Maybe now isn’t the time to uproot him. And besides, we were biting off more than we could chew with that mortgage, weren’t we?

Next time, he says. There are other houses.

I tell him it’s not about the house, not any more.

‘You know what that man is doing to her, Tom!’ I say. ‘How can I just walk away?’

‘You’re only hearing one side of the story,’ he says. ‘You barely even know this woman. You’ve been friends for what? Six weeks? Eight at most. We don’t know what their relationship is really like behind closed doors. These things are complicated—’

‘I’ve seen the bruises! There’s nothing complicated about it!’

‘And I’ve seen his!’

‘Come on!’

‘Millie, you’ve got absolutely no proof Felix is abusing her.’

‘She told me. Well, as good as.’

He sighs. ‘Millie, I know how raw this subject is for you, but I don’t think it’s that straightforward. I think there’s more going on than we—’

‘Are you saying she’s lying?’

‘I know, I know,’ he says, holding up his hands. ‘Believe the woman.’

It’s clear he doesn’t like Stacey. I don’t know what he’s suddenly got against her: they seemed to get on fine when we all met at the gala. Perhaps he’s jealous. Until now, I’ve never wanted anyone but him.

‘She needs me,’ I say.

Tom retreats. He knows better than to challenge me on this.

There was a Spar shop at the end of the road where Tom and I grew up. It was run by a short, immensely fat Polish woman called Marilla who’d lived above it since before we were born. She seemed ancient to us when we were nine years old, but she was probably no more than sixty at the time. She had a thick foreign accent and more than a hint of a moustache, and always wore a long-sleeved black dress, even in the height of summer.

One day, when she was clearing up a spill in one of the aisles, she rolled up her sleeves to squeeze out a sponge and exposed a blurry blue six-digit number tattooed on the outside of her forearm.

I knew about concentration camps. We’d done a whole block about Auschwitz in our Social Studies class only the previous term.

‘Marilla lost her whole family in the camps,’ my mother said when I asked her about the tattoo. ‘Her parents were sent to the gas chamber, and her sisters died from starvation in labour camps. She told me once she always keeps a bread roll in her pocket, even now.’

‘But she isn’t Jewish,’ I said. ‘She wears a cross.’