She knows she has to go downstairs now, not make everything worse by delaying the inevitable. But she stays where she is, with her forehead against Tyra’s drawing of a pink house, a green lawn and a yellow dog. She can feel one of the pins pressing against her hairline and fights down the thoughts of the black crayon swirl above the pink house, the dark cloud that has featured in every last one of Tyra’s drawings for the past six months.

She swallows hard and focuses on slowing her breathing while her cramping throat begins to relax, expertly squashes pointless thoughts and the voice in her head whispering she has to leave him before it’s too late. It’s persistent this time; the words creep up her spine, burrow under her skin, pushing almost all the way inside. She indulges it until the noises from the living room downstairs jerk her back to reality.

He has turned off the news and put on music. The gentle first notes of Schubert’s eight symphony waft up from the ground floor. He chose it deliberately, she thinks to herself. Soon, the orchestra will be drowning out all other sounds.

Her inner voice has gone silent, given up and left. Her job for the next two hours is simple. To not provoke, not ‘bicker’. Just endure until he’s done for today.

And to not let the children hear.

She takes a deep breath and runs the numbers. Half a bottle of wine with dinner and the whiskey he was pouring himself when she went upstairs to put the children to bed. He probably had time for at least one more while she worked on getting them to go to sleep. Tyra had been fussy, had wanted Mummy to stay, to climb into bed with her.

Half a bottle of wine, a couple of glasses of whiskey, maybe three. Not enough to make him unsteady, not enough to make the blows slow and unfocused. Just enough for the silent rage that has been building since the moment he came home to require venting, releasing the wordless hatred that has grown stronger with every second he has spent in the house. The looks he gave her when he realised the children were still eating in the kitchen, even though it was seven o’clock, that she had bought the wrong wine, that she hadn’t tidied up the toys in the living room. Not a word, just that sound when he kicked one of Mikkel’s cars so hard they could all hear the plastic cracking against the wall. Then he’d come back into the kitchen and tousled his son’s hair with a smile.

‘You have to remind Mummy to keep the house neat and tidy, sweetie,’ he’d said. ‘She keeps forgetting things.’