She rings the bell. Her mother blinks into the dull drizzle, a camera lens opening and shutting, finding focus. Then without saying a word she rushes inside, leaving Simone standing on the doorstep, peering into the corridor where her mother flings open the door to the study that was always so tightly, determinedly shut. A second later, her father appears – older, smaller, but there. Together, Simone’s parents return to the door. Together, they hover, unable still to pull Simone towards them, to pull her back, to break their own chains of restraint, though she thinks she sees their desire for this. They hold each other’s arms. “Come inside,” her father whispers finally.

Come in. Come in. A door open.

But there is no time.

There is no time for the unpicking of a decade. There is no time for recriminations and apologies. The only time is now, and now, she needs only one thing. “Is Dominic with you? Is he here?”

At once, her mother’s face changes. “You’ve lost Dominic?”

At once, Simone feels the accusation, the familiar judgment. She is seventeen again. Buried bitterness stirs inside her. But no, she isn’t seventeen, she tells herself, she is no longer an angry, needy child. “I’ve left Terry,” she says, noticing her mother’s hands fly to her chest. “Dominic doesn’t know. I had to do it quickly – he was at school. And yes, I can’t find him. I need to get to him before he goes home. I thought he might be here?”

“We haven’t seen Dominic in four years,” Simone’s father tells her gently, quietly, with what she can see is a great attempt to keep the blame from this truth. Simone waits nevertheless for more – since you told us to steer clear, since your boyfriend threatened to hurt us, since you let him do that – but it doesn’t come. “Can we help?” he asks.

Can we help?

And come in.

Simone’s parents stand waiting at the door. They see her, and they see her need, and it is everything she has ever wanted.

Except that Dominic is not there. And the emptiness of that wraps itself around her throat harder than Terry’s hands ever did, and turns her away, and pushes her back down the steps towards the street that so many years ago she abandoned in stupid, helpless defiance. Only it is different this time. Because at the last minute, she stops and dashes back up the stairs, past her surprised parents, and past the wide open door of her father’s study where she rips a sheet of paper from his ready pad and with scratching nib scrawls her phone number before thrusting it into their hands.

“If he comes here, call me,” she tells them.

Her father stays her arm. Ripping a scrap of paper off the sheet, he removes a pen from behind his ear and writes his own number, which he hands to her. “When you find him,” he says. “And any time after that too, call us. You can always call us.”