If I’d hoped to guilt-trip him, that was a pipe dream. ‘You lied. I asked you to tell me everything and you lied. You are a liar, Suzi. I can’t trust a word you say.’

I got up, edging away from him. I couldn’t go back in that cellar, breathing in the smell of dust and plastic. I couldn’t. Left out on the counter was a knife Nick had used to slice the vegetables. I could see shreds of carrot clinging to it. I seized it with an unsteady hand, feeling how much I was shaking.

‘Stop it, Nick. You’re scaring me. The baby . . .’

He sneered. ‘The baby, the baby! Poor bloody kid, with a slutty mother like you! Sometimes I think it’d be better off not being born.’

Oh shit. The murder-suicide, favourite method of angry, vengeful fathers. He wouldn’t. This was Nick. All the same, panic was clawing at my arms. I steadied the knife with my other hand.

‘Come on, be reasonable,’ I tried. ‘This doesn’t change anything we talked about.’

‘It changes everything.’

He lunged at me, and I dropped the knife. The noise of it clattering on the floor tiles was the worst thing I had ever heard. His face was very close to mine.

‘You bitch, you bitch, you slut, you whore.’ He said it so quietly, almost a whisper, it made it even more terrifying.

What could I do? Girl, you better save yourself.

My eyes darted round the kitchen in a nanosecond. There on the draining rack was the lid of my Le Creuset pot, a heavy orange thing we’d got as a wedding present. I had used it the night we had Nora over for dinner, when I still thought there was a way out of all this. I lifted it, my wrist complaining at the weight, and hit Nick hard in the face with it. It was so easy that I shocked myself, feeling the reverb all the way up my wrist.

I dropped it but Nick was staggering, turning white.

‘Fucking . . . bitch . . . you fucking . . .’

My phone was on the table, the landline right nearby. I could have called an ambulance. But he was already pulling himself to his feet, and so, taking my chance this time, in a thin jumper and bare feet, I ran out into the snow.

Eleanor

Eleanor

‘Oh – it’s you.’

After Bill, my elderly chauffeur, had dropped me at the hospital, I followed the same route as before to the obs and gynae wing. I hadn’t even thought what I’d do if Dr Holt wasn’t working tonight. Or how I would explain myself, given that he didn’t officially know I was Suzi’s neighbour. In the end, there was no need to worry. He was there, sleeves rolled up, hair sticking on end, buying a Coke from a vending machine draped in tinsel. I approached. ‘Dr Holt? It’s—’