The light was on in the kitchen, and the living room, and the hall. Either people were still up or they had no regard for our electricity bill. Jodi was in the kitchen in her pyjamas, holding the cafetière. I saw she’d emptied it straight into the sink, and the grounds sat in little brown clumps, like a swarm of ants. Didn’t she know it would clog? ‘Hope you don’t mind? Callum’s a bit worse for wear.’

‘Where is he?’

She lifted the kettle, and I noticed how careful her gestures were, as if she was carrying a clutch of fresh eggs in her hands. ‘Passed out on your sofa, I’m afraid. I found him there when I came down for water.’

I should have left her a carafe and glass. I usually did. I’d forgotten, what with Julie and everything. ‘Maybe we should let him sleep, if he’s out?’

I don’t know what she would have replied, because that was the moment I heard the kitchen door – the groan and creak of it – and the sound of Karen’s staggering footsteps. She had bare feet, and there was grass in her hair and pressed into her face, leaving small indentations in her skin. Her eyes were wide and a smear of blood was red across her cheek. And then, of course, she said what she said, and nothing was ever the same again. ‘He raped me. He raped me.’

And Jodi, asking what I did not dare: ‘Who, Karen? What do you mean?’

And Karen saying, ‘Mike. It was Mike,’ before she fell to her knees, utterly broken.

Bill

He was glad he’d come, on the whole. He hadn’t been at all sure when biking down, marinating in sweat under his leathers. He hated this kind of town, with its boutique shops for the left-at-home wives, its unspoken snobberies. Even the countryside looked different. More compact somehow, rounded and soft and green. In Sweden, everything looked like it had been smashed into chunks, jagged, proud. He’d forgotten how squashed-up southern England was. It was strange too to speak English in the petrol station, hear the squawking Kent accent and even feel the familiar words in his mouth.

This wasn’t somewhere he’d expected Ali to live. She’d always talked about Paris, New York, Berlin – not mid-Kent, with its commuter towns and overly pretty villages where a house would set you back over half a million. It was the kind of place Mike was always going to end up, and Ali had been dragged with him, pulled along like the tail of a comet. That was . . . disappointing. But not surprising. He told himself it was never going to end any other way.