At least they would not have been able to hear his hand pressing down on her face, or the force of his teeth on her breast. And they would not have seen her lying there afterwards, her nose bleeding, her pyjamas still around her ankles.

Dominic saw.

In the years before Terry, it was Dominic who would have picked her up from such collapse. If she was throwing up, he brought her a towel and some water, helped her into bed, and whenever she didn’t have a boyfriend, he slept there with her, pretending not to be disturbed by her retching into the night. She liked to feel the warmth of his skin nearby, the sound of his breathing, and on the hazy mornings that followed, she would fondle his hair for a while, trying not to notice how needy and grateful his face was, before propping herself up in bed for a spliff, remembering halfway through that it was a school day. In the realisation of that she would throw on some tracksuit bottoms and a coat, and she would tear with him across the Concourse, fingers interlinked, laughing together at their flying frames. Then later he’d tell her what dress to wear for her date, and hold her cig while she tried it on, and when she got home, if she was still standing, he would stay up late with her watching TV.

That’s what they were doing the evening that Noah smashed the window. Dominic must only have been about four, but by then Noah wasn’t living with them. The locks had been changed and he was banging at the door, kicking and thumping. At first Simone had simply turned up the volume of the TV, but suddenly there was a clattering of glass from the window. She’d left Dominic on the sofa while she went to sort him, and in the end, all that had happened was she’d called Noah a fool, among other things, and let him come in, wrapping his bleeding hand in a bandage before pushing him back into the night. But after she closed the door, she’d spotted Dominic hiding behind it, trembling, standing guard with a steel saucepan he’d somehow dragged from the kitchen drawer. “I would have hit him for you, Mum,” he’d told her with a fierce, frantic sincerity. And it had been all she could do not to laugh at her little knight, who she pulled playfully towards her and carried back to the sofa. “I wish he was dead,” he’d said then. To which Simone hadn’t known what to say, so had only looked at her brooding, intense son, who until then she’d imagined only adored his father, and wondered what else about him she didn’t know.

This time, lying on the floor, there was no Dominic to pick her up. Jasmine had started to cry and for a moment she’d heard Dom’s footsteps moving towards his sister’s room, pausing at the door to the lounge where she was crumpled, but then, abruptly doubling back.