A sound from above makes her freeze mid-motion. Please, don’t let it be one of the children, not yet, dear Lord, please, I need more time. She instinctively holds her breath, every sense on high alert. Listening to the sounds as they change. Heavy footfall against the wooden floor upstairs, not Tyra’s, not Mikkel’s. His. She hears the bathroom door open, then the flush of the toilet and she closes her eyes and prays again. Please, God, don’t let him come back down, I can’t take anymore. Not now. Aylin doesn’t let go of the kitchen counter until five minutes later when the sound of snoring once again drifts down to her from the first floor. Heavy, hungover snoring.

Five days. Just five this time. Early on, it had been weeks between incidents, months even, at first. Enough time to heal, to conceal. Time to come up with plausible excuses for the bruises and broken ribs. No lame clichés about walking into doors or slipping on the stairs – you had to do a lot better than that if you didn’t want people to get suspicious. Patches of ice were good; people do slip on those. The slippery floors at the public pool, too. But never the same lie twice. She is good at remembering which ones she’s told to whom. Good at making up new things and never repeating the same story. Good at hiding. She has bought every available shade of concealer, learnt how to turn a split lip into an ulcer, which colours camouflage blue and green and which ones are best for concealing the last yellow remnants of a bruise. She thought she was good at picking appropriate clothes, too. She has been so stupid.

Marike had smelled a rat. Last spring she’d asked why she was wearing long sleeves and high necklines during the May heatwave. Afterwards, she’d wished her careless laughter in response to her friend’s question had sounded a little less convincing. That laughter had pushed the extended lifeline out of reach. Or was it that she had drifted away? She’d told herself she’s a different person now, that she has made her choice, that it’s too late to go back.

And he’s right. Not about everything, but when it counts. He has given her everything she ever wanted, things she could never have had without him. Tyra and Mikkel. Last night he had bellowed it so loudly she’d been afraid he’d wake them up. It had started the moment their babysitter’s taxi was out of sight.

‘Without me, you’d have nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing. And this is how you thank me? By behaving like some fucking whore?’