‘I’m with someone.’ Unconsciously, she touched her left ring finger, which was bare. ‘But you don’t just get over it. Something like that, it leaves scars.’ She looked up. ‘Your friend – he’s done these same things?’

‘I think so. It’s been more – gradual. Subtle.’ Because Suzi was a lot more spirited than this timid woman. It had taken longer, more devious means to break her. He had waited until she’d done something she was ashamed of, then whisked her away to her countryside prison. I wondered how long he’d been preparing the move before he told her.

I said goodbye to Lisa outside London Bridge, and watched her walk off on her thin little legs, a slow-burning anger for Nick deep beneath my ribcage. Somehow, over the last few weeks, it had begun to eclipse my rage at Suzi. Nick was controlling, gaslighting, contemptuous of her. And yet I couldn’t even think what I used to, that I’d been lucky not to have a man like that. Because he had been like that, hadn’t he? He’d convinced me I was crazy, imagining affairs. He’d lied to my face, for ten years. And he’d done other things. Stolen. Cheated. And maybe, as Conway was hinting, something even worse than that.

Suzi

Suzi

First, I needed to lay some groundwork. A place to run to if and when I blew my life up. Somewhere to escape to, someone to take my side now that Nora had turned out to not be the ally I’d thought. I told Nick I was going to see my mother. I explained it away with some pregnancy mumbo jumbo. ‘When you’re about to be a mother yourself, you just want to be with your own. Besides, we won’t see her over Christmas this year.’

He did his usual slow blink. ‘Usually you fight with her. Won’t that be bad for the baby?’

‘That’s sort of why I want to see her – I hope we can put some issues behind us, ready for her grandkid to arrive!’ I did my happy, hopeful mother-to-be smile, and soon Nick was nodding, offering to book the train tickets for me. To make sure I was really going, probably. I was, in fact. And things had become pretty bad when I was voluntarily making the trip to rural Oxfordshire.

Mum lived in a small, pretty village near Oxford, the kind with an active parish hall and multiple busybodies behind expensive shutter blinds. We saw three people she knew on the drive back from the station, and she honked the horn each time and waved. I found myself thinking, plenty of witnesses for Nick, and I almost laughed, things were so ridiculous.