‘Should get on with Jodi then,’ Karen smiled, and I smiled too, feeling guilt mingle with relief as our feet once again found the common ground between us. She was still my best friend, even if we didn’t see each other much, even if our lives had diverged. Even if I had this house now, which also gave me prickles of guilt now I saw it through her eyes, the lavishness of all this space, the Victorian brickwork and stained glass. Despite all that, time hadn’t come between us. And I was proud of that, of keeping our friendship, of saving it from that odd cooling we’d had in the months after university. When the six of us had brushed against something dark, and come away intact.

I turned at the door and looked out. Karen and Mike, leaning across the table to each other, laughing about something, and in the swing seat, his daughter and her son, so wrapped up in each other they didn’t even notice me leave. Hindsight is deadly. If I’d known then what was already happening, what would so soon engulf us, I might have taken a few more moments to stand there in the sun, and drink in all the things I was about to lose. But I didn’t, and so I left.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

‘Tell me one more time what happened.’

Despite the problem that had brought me to the police station on such a sunny day, I sort of liked myself in this role. Ali Morris, Chair of Bishopsdean Women’s Refuge. A title, a purpose, after years of just being Mum, Mrs Morris, Mike’s wife.

Vix, the charity’s Director, had met me at the station, in a room they let us use at moments such as this, which happened more often than you’d like to think. She was a slight woman of no more than thirty, with cropped black hair and dark-rimmed glasses. The kind of person you’d expect to find living in Berlin or somewhere, not Bishopsdean. I’d never asked what her story was, because in this kind of organisation they’re rarely easy to tell, or hear. We’d gone over and over the incident, figuring out what to do in response.

‘He came to the refuge about three last night. Julie swears she didn’t tell him where it was but I’m not sure I believe her. He broke the kitchen window and got in, found Julie in her room with the kids, got her by the throat against the wall.’

‘The kids saw?’

Vix just nodded. ‘One of the other women pressed the alarm and the police came. He had a knife. He – I think he was planning to use it.’

Whatever way we spun it, it was bad. ‘You’ve got a press statement drafted?’