“Hi, Melly.” Eve’s voice is brimming with warmth. “Why aren’t you here?”

“I’m at work in Wiltshire, I haven’t left yet. I’m sorry but I’ll miss your supper. Paul’s bringing Izzy.”

“They’ve arrived already. Charley and Blake are here, with Martin. Join us when you get back if you can, I expect we’ll go on till late. Bye-bye, lovely.” A kiss down the phone, the tickle of a laugh.

It’s less easy to disguise happiness in a voice than a face. Eve and Martin. She feels sick, poor Grace. They’ll be careful, surely, the children are there, Izzy notices everything. Melissa revisits the rooms, walking around slowly, reluctant to leave. After another hour she locks the door, dropping the key through the letterbox. It lands with a little thud, the house is no longer hers. Rain begins when she reaches the motorway; Paul calls as she’s passing Reading. She hears laughing in the background, music, and the noise of Ash wailing.

“We’re staying over.” Paul’s voice is slightly slurred. “Eric insisted, I couldn’t say no.”

He must be drunk for Eric to have made that suggestion, drunk enough not to be able to walk back home.

“We’re all having fun, except maybe little Ash,” he continues pleasantly. “Hang on a tick.” She hears a door shutting, footsteps, a door opening then shutting again; he must have walked out of the kitchen and into another room for privacy. “He won’t stop crying.” Paul’s voice has changed, darkened. “It’s driving me insane.”

Paul hates the noise of children crying. When Izzy cried as a baby, Melissa had to take her to another part of the house or out in the car. She bites back the offer she was going to make about collecting them. The anger and alcohol will make a potent mix; safer for her if he stays over there, Izzy will enjoy the night with her friends.

“What about Martin and the children?”

“His lady wife summoned them home.”

Once back at home, Melissa takes her laptop to the kitchen for the warmth of the stove and looks up Salisbury, reading about the cathedral with its fourteenth-century clock and thick surrounding walls. The countryside nearby, the town itself, had a feeling of ancient peace, a place where one could escape. Women escape danger all the time, there are safe houses everywhere. She looked them up once; places run by Women’s Aid where your partner can’t rape you whenever he wants, because he’d have no idea where you are.

She closes her laptop with a sharp click. What is she thinking of? People would say she’s lucky compared with most. She has a beautiful house, they’d say, money, a fantastic job, friends—though she’s afraid if she tells them the truth, they would struggle to believe her. She wouldn’t blame them; her marriage looks perfect from the outside and so does her husband. The truth would be humiliating and, worse, far too risky. Paul is clever. If he thought she was telling her friends, he’d hire a good lawyer, deny everything, and turn the tables on her. She’d be labeled anorexic, work obsessed, unfit to parent. He’d divorce her, gaining custody of Izzy.