This, she presumed, was what brought on the urge to take the bottle of vanilla extract. Whatever it was, as soon as her fingers closed around the smooth glass bottle, everything else faded away. Her handbag sat in the basket in the front of her trolley in the spot where the boys sat if they were with her. It would be so easy. She just needed to lean forward as if about to put the bottle in the trolley but drop it into her bag instead, like she’d done so many times before.

After her last session with Dr Shearer, Tully had started on SSRIs, as well as a drug called naltrexone, which supposedly helped to control impulse-based behaviour. Fat lot of good it was doing her. Beyond that, she’d been given some ‘exercises’ to do if she found herself in this situation. The first was the most ridiculous of them all. Breathe. Good one, doc, she’d wanted to say. She needed to shoplift in order to breathe, that was the whole point! She didn’t tell Dr Shearer this, that would be rude. Who was she to point out that the technique he’d spent his whole life studying was useless? Instead she’d just nodded and smiled . . . even muttered, Breathe! What a wonderful idea.

The next step was to remove herself from temptation. This was important, apparently. Don’t remove the temptation, the psychologist had said. Remove yourself.

It won’t be easy. In fact, it will feel entirely unnatural, he’d warned. It might mean leaving the store. It might mean starting a conversation with someone when you least feel like it. It might mean drawing attention to yourself. Inviting attention. A circuit breaker, so to speak.

The pressure inside her was building. Tully tried reminding herself of the guilt she would feel afterwards. Lately, the guilt had become even more debilitating than the urge itself. Not to mention the terror of getting caught. After the incident at the department store, the police had put a note on her record, which meant that if she was caught shoplifting again, she would be prosecuted. She imagined having to tell Sonny she’d been caught. She imagined the boys finding out. Their friends’ parents gossiping about it.

Her grip tightened on the bottle as she held it over her bag. Then, at the last minute, she dropped it onto the floor, hard.

‘Whoops,’ Tully said as it smashed into pieces.

Three women nearby looked away from the shelves to the broken bottle. One of them was a woman about Tully’s age with twin toddlers strapped into a double pram and a newborn dangling from a pouch on her chest. ‘Oh, phew,’ she said. ‘I thought one of my kids did it!’

‘Me too,’ muttered another woman, whose little boy kept kicking a ball despite her begging for him to stop.

‘I’ll call an attendant,’ said the third, a helpful woman in her seventies, carrying just a small basket.

All of them smiled at each other. And Tully felt something, a tiny thing, release in her.