“Can’t he leave?”

Lauren shook her head, quickly explaining about the blackmail material.

“That’s dreadful. Evil.”

“We need to make her stop. Fiona, I’m not sure if you know her?”

“From the book club.”

“She said you had an argument once. Casey was screaming in your face and then you whispered in her ear, and suddenly she backed off. What did you say?”

“She was so, so good in the beginning,” Markus said. “We were so happy. For months. And then one day she just hit me on the back of the head. Without warning. Imagine that. Imagine you love this woman. You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her. And then, just like that, she turns violent. I thought I’d imagined it at first.”

Lauren took a sip of her tea, watching, saying nothing. He clearly wanted to talk, and she wasn’t in a rush.

“After that, it only got worse. I couldn’t even… even acknowledge it for a long time. Do you know what that’s like, hiding something, even from yourself?”

Lauren did know, but she hadn’t felt like it since she was perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. She liked to think she’d grown; she was twenty-four now. She felt like she was finally becoming herself. More assertive, but not in an ugly way. She was doing this, wasn’t she? Even when she’d been told no.

“Yes,” Lauren said after a pause.

“I was so ashamed,” he went on. “No matter what anybody says, it’s embarrassing, being beaten up by a woman. I bet you think that sounds sexist.”

Lauren smiled softly. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. You seem very modern, I guess.”

Lauren guessed he meant her dyed hair and her outfit. She was wearing some chic dungarees, with heavy combat boots. Some idiot – a cruel person who thankfully was no longer her friend and would never be again – had once called her a cliché because of her outfit choices. It always annoyed her, really pissed her off honestly, because she liked dressing like this. She wasn’t making a statement or anything else. She was simply wearing what she wanted. But some people couldn’t get past the surface level. People like that, who never bothered to peer deeper, led the most miserable and narcissistic lives.

But she didn’t think Markus was that sort of person.

“I don’t think you’re sexist. I think you were scared.”

“It’s just… it’d be so much easier if she was a man. Mentally, I mean. It makes you feel so, so small.”

“That makes sense.”

“How much do you know about her childhood?”

“Nothing,” Lauren said.

“She rarely talked about it, but a few years ago, we got into this huge argument and she started ranting. Her mum died when she was seven, and she loved her mum; that was the only time I saw genuine emotion, I think, in hindsight. The only time she wasn’t pretending. When she was talking about her mum. But then the story would change.”