‘You always did this to us, Tara!’ my mother said. ‘So much trouble!’

‘Think about Christian, can’t you?’ I said. ‘He’s the one who’s suffering.’

‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Did you think about Christian?’

Downstairs in the living room, my father had finally reached his lawyer and Skyla was answering the landline. My young intern had been great. Mary had not been quite so helpful, switching off after our conversation, as if stunned and repulsed by my business-trip behaviour, and then ducking out of the office without saying goodbye. But Skyla had accompanied me home and was now single-handedly holding back the massed ranks of the media. It was perfect, of course – the digital matchmaker whose own marriage was a train wreck. The irony was not lost on me.

‘You should talk to this one,’ Skyla said, covering the mouthpiece. ‘It’s not another journalist. It’s Sophie Sherman. The vlogger. The POI. Person of influence.’

‘I know who Sophie Sherman is.’

And what a POI is, I thought. I’m not old yet.

Sophie Sherman had made her name by breaking a couple of big sexual abuse stories. A handsome Shakespearean actor in his sixties and a children’s entertainer who had grinned gamely with stuffed animals from one end of my childhood to the other. Sophie Sherman had outed them both as sexual bullies, serial molesters and congenital creeps. With meticulous research and a refusal to be intimidated, she had taken them down.

‘I’m not interested,’ I told her, taking the phone from Skyla.

‘So hang up now,’ Sophie Sherman said. ‘And then you can take your chances with the hyenas who I bet are already on your doorstep. And who will – I can guarantee – paint you as the Whore of Babylon.’

She breathed out, as if relieved that I was still there.

‘But I can get you through this, Tara,’ she said.

I said nothing. But I did not hang up. And I was listening.

Sophie Sherman spoke more quickly now.

‘James Caine has a history of coercive control. He has been abusing women for years. You’re not the first. Rather incredibly, I don’t think you were even the last. There was a sexual harassment case that was settled out of court and there was a young woman on the fringes of his business – someone he was involved with, someone who would not let go, a young woman of junior status – who killed herself.’

My father was talking urgently with his lawyer. My mother’s voice came through the child monitor. Skyla was in the hallway, collecting the notes that the press kept pushing through the letterbox.

And Christian, my Christian, was sitting in some cell, seeing me clearly for the first time.

Sophie Sherman kept talking, offering me a way out.

‘This is what you have to understand, Tara,’ she said. ‘James Caine is not the victim here – you are.’

She kept talking as my father hung up his phone, giving me a wide, reassuring grin and a big double thumbs up and I smiled back at him, my eyes burning with sudden tears, for the world was always a much better, far kinder place when my dad was smiling at me.