‘Did you?’

Louisa looks at her and nods. ‘I fought back. For a long time he was stronger.’

Not any more, Isla thinks. She wonders when the power tipped. If her dad is nervous, in the house with a woman who harbours a grudge. She thinks of Dom tipping vodka down the sink, his back to her.

‘There were happy times, weren’t there?’ Louisa says.

You’re never happy, Isla thinks, and she wonders where that came from. ‘Of course there were,’ she says. ‘But the bad times were really bad.’

The rain falls harder, the house barely visible. Isla watches her mum’s face, the stiffened tendons in her neck. She knows her mother won’t apologise, or express her regret. It’s not her way. Isla spent her teenage years enraged over this: her mum would never bend or concede that she might be wrong. It had driven her ever closer to her dad; neither of them were ever in the right about anything.

‘Do you believe him, Mum?’

‘Believe who?’

‘Dad. Do you believe his story, about Mandy?’

Louisa steps backwards into the rain. She is immediately drenched, her hair flattened. ‘Do you want to see something?’

Isla can barely see her mother’s face. ‘Do I want to see what?’

‘Something you ought to know about.’

Isla follows her mum across the grass, keeping her head down. She leaves her shoes on the mat. Louisa walks straight through to the main bedroom, throwing her towel over a chair. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘In here.’

Isla sits down on the bed. Rainwater drips down her neck. The room is warm, the window misted up. The ironing is piled high on a chair in one corner, the laundry basket overflowing beside it. A bunch of roses, long dead, droop from a vase on the dresser.

Louisa reaches around in the back of a drawer. ‘I found this a few months ago. Your father keeps it at the back of his sock drawer with the vodka we pretend I don’t know about.’

Isla pushes her wet hair out of her eyes. She has a suspended feeling, of curiosity meeting dread. ‘What is it?’

‘It was Mandy’s.’ Louisa holds a watch by its strap. ‘I recognised it the moment I saw it.’

Isla stands and looks at the watch. It’s long and narrow, gold-plated, with a thin, oblong face and notches instead of numbers. The time has stopped just after twelve-thirty.

‘Your father didn’t bother denying it was hers,’ Louisa continues. ‘I told him to get rid of it but he refused.’

Isla turns away from the watch. The rain is heavy against the window. She has a trapped feeling in the airless room.

‘I always had a suspicion about him and Mandy,’ Louisa says. ‘You can tell, can’t you, when a man’s head is turned.’

‘It doesn’t mean.’ Isla can’t finish the sentence.

‘She was an attractive woman,’ Louisa says.

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘For God’s sake.’

‘You’re jumping to conclusions.’

‘He’s admitted he was infatuated with her. Nothing serious, he claims.’ Louisa closes her hand around the watch. ‘This was a while ago of course, before the police turned up.’