‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ said Bill soothingly. He’d been there when I got back from the office, and without asking he’d made dinner from leftovers, and then washed up and fielded the kids while I sat numb, unable to do anything. I should have asked him how Karen was, I knew that, but my mouth felt stopped up. I was still reeling. In front of me, my phone spouted bile. Somehow, Mike’s name had got on to Twitter, and the glee was hard to bear. I’d spoken out about rape, I’d scolded and berated, and now here I was, supposedly protecting my abusive husband. The urge to fight back, to shout that he’d never do a thing like that, that it must be a mistake, was almost overwhelming. I had just enough sense left to know that would only make things worse. I’d already had to call Mike’s parents in France, because even they were on Facebook, then listen to their bewilderment, his mother’s tears, all the while wanting to burst into some of my own. I wondered if my mother had heard. What she might say – well, Alison, you’ve made your bed. I wasn’t going to call her.

Bill and I were now sitting at my kitchen table, glasses of whisky in front of us. I hadn’t touched mine. It was so strange to have him there, to know that all I had to do was stretch out my hand and I could reach him, touch him, after all these years. I tightened my grip on my phone. The house didn’t feel like my own. It had a discarded, dirty air, after all the strange feet that had tracked through it, the tears that had been shed. I realised I was sitting where Karen had when she stumbled in from the garden. I looked over towards the door; the drop of blood was still visible on the slate tiles. I wondered where that jumper of Mike’s was – there was no sign of it around the decking, where I’d last seen it dropped. The last thing we needed was something else that made him look guilty. I’d cancelled Andrej for the next day, on the police’s request, in case they wanted to search the garden again. Irrationally, I worried about who would cut the grass. I didn’t know how to use the mower.