‘He’ll wake up,’ I said, though I wasn’t at all sure. The doctors were being cagey with me, comforting but vague. ‘He hit his head, so he just needs to rest it for a while.’

‘Jake did it.’ Benji’s lip was trembling too. ‘Why did he do it?’

I looked at Cassie; she turned away. I said, ‘Because. He was very angry and upset, and he lashed out. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt Daddy.’

‘He meant to.’ Cassie’s voice was low and hard. ‘He looked right at me and he did it.’ Benji bit his lip. His eyes were full of tears, glassy and about to fall. ‘Dad threw himself in front of me,’ she told him. ‘He was really brave.’

‘Jake wouldn’t have hurt you, darling.’

She looked at me. ‘He hurt Dad. Did you ever think he’d do that?’

I thought of Jake, the sweet shy boy who’d come to my house every day after school until he was seven and we moved away. Crying on the day we left, the tears sliding down his nose and landing on the Jammy Dodger I’d given him to try and sweeten the blow. He hadn’t touched it, as if it was a point of principle. Even though I told myself we had to do what was best for our family, I’d found it hard to shake the feeling I’d abandoned Jake. Abandoned Karen. That we’d left a part of the family behind us.

At least it must have stopped after that. The affair. Not an affair, he’d pleaded. Just the one time. And Karen saying no, it had infiltrated every moment I’d known both of them. Most of my life. Who was lying? The truth of this was for me a double-edged sword. Either the affair was real, in which case he’d lied to me, or she was making it up to hurt me. But why would she damage her own case like this? And if it was real, why would he rape her? I knew intellectually this was not how rape worked, but all the same I couldn’t get my head to accept it.

I looked at Mike, his slack face with the tube pushing his lips out. Grotesque. He would have hated this. There were so many things I would have asked him. What really happened? I wanted dates, times, details. I wanted to go back to every photo, every memory, and have him tell me which ones I needed to burn and slash. Which ones were spoiled forever by what they’d done. Really, I wanted him to tell me it wasn’t true. Karen was a liar. None of this was real.