Each room in the house is ruined: broken crockery in the kitchen, the chairs turned over. Ornaments and mementoes crushed underfoot. In the living room, the TV is face down on the carpet. A bottle of Smirnoff lies empty on the couch. No sign of her dad. She doesn’t know when she last saw him. He will be angry, when he sees this. She is alone here and she sometimes fears him. Everything between them has changed and the trust has gone. She doesn’t remember why.

She picks up the phone and puts the receiver back in place. The answerphone is upturned beside it, flashing red, on and off. She stands beside it as the message plays. A British accent wants her to call him right away, regarding the apartment on Sinclair Road. It’s urgent, he says. His voice is pompous. She hits delete.

There is a call she needs to make, something she needs to say. It fills her head. She lifts the receiver and dials the London number. The phone rings in the small flat in Hackney and she holds the phone tight against her ear, ready to hear Dom’s voice.

‘Hi,’ the recording says. ‘This is Dom and Isla’s number. Leave us a message and we’ll get back to you.’

She waits for the beep. ‘Sorry,’ she says. It makes her cry. She thinks of the mornings there was blood on the pillow. She broke his tooth the first time. Cuts and bruises. A broken nose. He never fought back. A good man, who tried to help her, and one morning he was gone. She listens to the message twice more and she tells him each time that she’s sorry, she loves him, she hates what she did. What she is.

Pain wakes her in the early hours. She lifts her head and sees the broken jug, the lampshade. Her head pounds. In the bathroom she swallows painkillers, catching her face in the mirror above the basin. Sallow skin and pale eyes, like her dad’s. She looks away, leaving an image in her mind of wild, outgrown hair: dark roots and brittle, copper-blonde streaks.

Isla leans into the bath and turns the tap for the shower. Pain fills her skull and she retches into the plughole. She strips, stands under the hot water and cries tears of self-pity, coughing and choking, her head pressed against the tiles. The last thing she remembers clearly is standing in Doug’s front yard. The reluctance in his face as he told her what he’d seen. She stays there, replaying the conversation until the water runs cold.

She fills three black bags with broken crockery and crushed ceramics, eases photographs from cracked picture frames. She puts the lamp back together. By midday the house is clean, if damaged. She goes to her dad’s hiding places and finds only empty bottles.

At lunchtime he walks through the door. She waits in the kitchen where she is cooking, drinking coffee, taking the day one minute at a time. He calls her name but she doesn’t reply. He stays where he is. She hears him turning over the coins in his pocket; his cough. The strike of her knife against the chopping board.