An hour or so later, a voice told me to pick myself up from the floor.

My mum. Get up honey, she whispered. You need to get up.

Rex was in the shower, so I hauled myself upstairs; fished the last vodka bottle from the back of the airing cupboard. A useful hiding place, given he never did a stitch of laundry.

Or any sort of housework, in fact.

‘A woman’s work,’ he affirmed every time I suggested he might pick up the hoover, go shopping, cook a meal. He was very good at doing the garden though: the DIY, the things that get noticed from outside. ‘And the house is in my name, so…’

And it was. In the 2020s. Truly his father’s son.

Even though my salary was also paid into the joint account the mortgage comes out of. But I’d given up the arguments.

Sitting on the back step, nursing the remnants of the bottle, I gazed at my mobile – a device that no longer worked.

Rex had trodden on it, then scooped up the house phone, along with the family laptop, and taken those upstairs with him.

Pure vodka like electricity in my blood, I stood again; then stumbled, lightheaded. God knows when I last ate.

Hand on the wall, I crept through the lounge – quietly, quietly, quietly – and opened the front door. Froze when I thought—

No: it was just the noise of the boiler, cranking up for the shower.

I stepped into the front garden with the sole idea of… what?

Where was I going?

Ruby’s.

But then I remembered: I couldn’t go there. No way. God.

Along the square, the lights were blazing at neighbour Bill’s.

I’ll go there, I thought hazily.

I got as far as our front gate, the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, when I heard a voice.

Rex’s voice – low, hissing. Behind me. ‘Get back here.’

My hand was on the gate latch, the cigarette end an orange ember, circular, rotating in the shadow of the pavement.

That man Fin, by the looks of it, reading a text perhaps, leaning on the lamp post just outside, smoking, neon hard hat dangling from his wrist.

He turned.

Our eyes met.

The hand on my shoulder. Rex, his breath hot on my neck.

He saw the other man. I felt him falter.

‘All right, mate,’ Rex said affably.

We cannot undo the past, however hard we try. We can work on it, on ourselves, to a degree, but try as we might, we cannot change what has happened to us.

We can only assimilate the damage.

I dropped my eyes from Fin’s scrutiny, Rex’s hand heavy on my shoulder. I turned and went back inside.

Ruby

TUESDAY 3 OCTOBER

Zach didn’t go to school on Tuesday.

Instead, I took him to the police station, where he was to be interviewed in the presence of a young man who introduced himself as ‘Jon from the Youth Offending Team’, alongside a ginger-haired CID officer called Graham Dudds. Late to the meeting was a harried female social worker whose name I didn’t catch, who fiddled with a hair-tie until I wanted to shout at her.