‘I don’t know,’ Holly says. She has often asked herself this question, but the truth is she doesn’t know. She only knew about the affair when she got that call from Leela. She recalls the distraught voice telling her that he’d ended their relationship. She’d barely made sense to Holly.

Beside her, Jackson begins to cry. She doesn’t tell him that Leela committed suicide that same night, and that it was most likely because of Greg. This is already enough for her son to cope with. He can never find out that Holly was blackmailing Greg, threatening to tell people about his involvement with Leela if he didn’t pay her off every month. Think of it as alimony, she’d told him, even though the amount she’d demanded was far beyond what was reasonable.

‘I was… in a lot of pain,’ she continues. ‘I loved him, and I didn’t want our marriage to end. And I made him tell people that I was the one who’d left him because I couldn’t handle being thought of as the woman who was left by her husband. I have too much pride, and that’s my downfall.’

Jackson rubs his chin. ‘Is this why you’re always so sad?’

Holly is shocked; she hasn’t realised that Jackson saw her this way. ‘Maybe,’ she says.

‘Dad did this to you? He’s the reason you’re always on your own, and you didn’t like Andrew?’

‘Probably.’ A tragic case, she thinks. Psychologists would have a field day with her.

Jackson leans forward and throws his arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry, Mum. All this time I’ve been blaming you for leaving Dad when it was his fault all along.’

Holly holds on tightly to Jackson; he is the one good thing in her life, the only thing that makes everything Greg put her through worth it. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone, though, Jackson. Promise me? Your dad and I have an arrangement. He gives us a lot of money so that we can be in our lovely house. If people find out, then he’ll stop paying so much and we’d have to move. Do you understand?’ If Holly is honest with herself, she likes having this bond with Greg – until now, nobody knew about his affair other than her, and it’s made her feel closer to him.

‘Is that okay, then, Jax?’ she says when there’s no answer.

She thinks that she feels Jackson nodding his agreement.

After that, neither of them speak of Holly’s revelation. On the phone, when Greg calls, Jackson is quiet, and he gives nothing away.

It feels good to have things out in the open – she’s felt terrible keeping something so important from her son – until the evening she comes home and knows the second she steps through the door that something is wrong.