Through her damaged throat, the words dredged up as if in deep-sea nets, Cassie told me what had happened. One more story of that night, the space of a few hours in which so many things had been broken for ever.

It had been easy for Cassie to slip out. I’d gone to bed, her father was – preoccupied, and also very drunk, and Benji was fast asleep. A house of adults, full of their own concerns. She’d gone out the back door into the woods, in her flip-flops and pyjamas, a cardigan thrown over them. Aaron had been waiting for her under the trees. It was very dark, the streetlights on the main road hardly penetrating. ‘I was scared,’ Cassie told me, sounding ashamed. ‘I kept thinking about that film, the Blair Witch one. It freaked me out.’ She’d been pleased to see him, glad to get away from whatever strange tensions were in the house, but when she’d tried to tell him about it, her parents’ boring, drunk friends, he’d stopped her words with a heavy kiss. ‘Not even like a kiss,’ she said, trying to work it out. ‘Like he didn’t want me to breathe.’

I remembered kisses like that. The kind that say, shut up now, silly girl. Then it was all going fast, and his hands were under her pyjamas and he was undoing his jeans and pushing at her. That was how she described it. ‘Sort of pushing, and grabbing, really hard, so it hurt.’ How I wished I’d taken the time to talk to her about sex. Not ‘the talk’, with all the distant biology of it all. About how it should be, that you shouldn’t feel like you were fighting off a mugger or negotiating a contract with someone’s hand down your pants. That it should never hurt, and that your own pleasure mattered. All things I had no idea of at her age. And beyond.

‘He made you?’ I asked quietly.

She screwed up her face. ‘I told him I’d changed my mind. I wasn’t ready. He – he was pissed off.’ I wondered how I would act if I saw Aaron around town, his mother with her pinched lips and Prada handbag. If I’d be able to walk past without grabbing the little bastard.

‘Sweetheart, if he made you – if you didn’t want to – you know what that means?’

She went quiet, and I worried I’d pushed it too far with the feminist lecture. ‘Jake said that too. On the night. He thought I shouldn’t do it.’

Jake. Trying to protect her, only to stab her father a few days later. I couldn’t make sense of it. ‘So . . . ?’