I sat in my car outside the prison, tears running down my face. Maybe it was the shame of asking him to do what I couldn’t bear for Cassie. Slice into his smooth unmarked skin. Offer up bits of himself to a father that didn’t deserve it. How had Mike never suspected? He must have. He’d turned his back, as I had.

I wiped my tears, ashamed of breaking down, and remembered to turn my phone on again from where it had lain in the prison locker. Immediately the ding of alerts. Missed calls, messages. I was so tempted, for a moment, to ignore it. The human nervous system can only handle so many shocks and disasters, before we become numb to danger. I was beginning to feel that way. As I considered putting it away, it began to ring again. The house. I answered, and heard my mother’s voice on the end.

‘Alison?’ High and wavering. I knew that tone. She was scared. I was already putting the car in gear as she told me what had happened.

1996

‘We should get back,’ Bill said. ‘We’ll miss breakfast otherwise.’

I was longing for that – the decadence of Buck’s Fizz before noon, the burnt-out sexy exhaustion of it all – but at the same time I didn’t want to break whatever this was between us. We’d walked around the university parks for hours, crossing bridges, me lifting my skirt over puddles, watching the river and the early-morning rowers go by, coxes shouting. It felt like a film about Oxford, about being young and glamorous and privileged. I had my usual stab of jealousy at the over-educated kids being propelled around by punctilious parents. What could I have been if I’d had that kind of upbringing? Someone who knew Latin, for a start. Then I had what I recognised as a more mature thought than I was used to. It didn’t matter that my childhood had been ordinary, even embarrassing. I was here now, in a silk dress, with a man in a tuxedo, and we’d stayed up all night talking about books, and music, and life. I felt huge and hollowed-out with the talk we’d had. The kind that changes your life. It was tomorrow now and I wasn’t going to be the same. I didn’t have to be the Ali I’d been born and brought up as – I could be anything.

Bill and I were walking back now, my skirts swishing round me. He’d given me his jacket, because he was the kind of boy who’d do that, and I thought we must make quite a sight, traipsing down the street on a weekday morning, his hands in the pockets of his oversize trousers, my hands lost in the sleeves of the jacket. I kept turning to look at him. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing. I’m just seeing you.’

‘Seeing me.’