What I will describe is what it did to me, crouched in the dark behind that shed, because it is the moment my whole understanding of my own life inverted.

An hour earlier I had been a woman engaged to a man I loved, meeting his family, choosing to read the strangeness of the house as eccentricity because that was easier than the alternative.

And now I was watching the man I loved sit calmly in a chair, entirely unbothered, while a woman was hurt in front of him — not flinching, not looking away, not even particularly interested, the way you might sit through a task you’d performed many times before.

It was the calm that undid me.

If Percival had been enraged, in the grip of some passion, I could almost have understood it as a monstrous loss of control.

But there was no passion in that chair.