“Tell Lee twenty times if you want to,” I say. “Have you got a Dictaphone? Record my request and your refusal so that you can play it back to him later.”

Melissa nods. I have said the right thing, albeit snidely, and am now allowed access to the second stage of conditional welcome: refreshments—in theory, at least. I’d be foolish to take anything for granted until I’ve got a mug of PG Tips in my hand. I’ve got through to kitchen level on a couple of previous occasions and then been ordered to leave before the kettle’s boiled.

I follow Melissa down the hall, clamping my arms against my sides as I pass the shelf of meticulously aligned ornaments: a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight, a white ceramic angel and a wooden boat. They’re precisely spaced so that the one in the middle is equidistant from the other two. Whenever I’m within touching distance, I imagine sweeping them off the shelf with my elbow and sending them crashing to the ground. One day, the fantasy might not be enough for me.

Not safe yet. Just outside the kitchen door, there’s a framed studio photograph of Lee and Melissa beaming joyously, like people who have never met either Lee or Melissa, with their heads touching in a way that suggests they’d ideally like to be conjoined twins.

These are the kind of horrible thoughts I can’t help having when I’m inside the rectangle of rectangles. Hard edges, straight lines and sharp corners—in this house, that’s how you blend in, how you survive. Even when you stare down at the varnished wooden floor because you can’t bear to look anywhere else, the floorboards remind you: straight edges, hard lines . . .

I manage to walk past the conjoined-twins photograph without pulling it off its hook and stamping on it, but I can’t help tormenting myself by looking at it for longer than I need to.

The gleam of teeth from matching smiles . . .

I’ve never believed it when people say that married couples start to resemble one another physically, but since Melissa and Lee got together, she has taken on several aspects of his style. She’s still as dark and olive-skinned as he is blond and pale, but her once-unruly long hair is now short and tidy, and she wears only plain, solid colors, never patterns anymore.

I can remember Lee becoming hysterical at age five, when Mum tried to put a stripy cardigan on him. “It’s messy!” he screamed. “There are things on it! Take it off!” Mum did, straightaway. Everything that frightened Lee as a toddler was immediately removed by our parents: patterned clothes, bananas, books with scary pictures in them, the cuddly penguin in his bedroom that apparently shrieked at him at night while everyone else was asleep, the bicycle he fell off and couldn’t forgive.