“I know,” Colin said. “That’s the bit that’s kept me up for four years, and I’ve never said it out loud, and you’ve never asked me.”

That is true and it is the part I have had to sit with. I never asked him. For four years afterward I let him be the man who arrived in the doorway and said call the police, because I needed one adult in that story to have been unambiguously good, and it was easier if it was my husband.

He was good that night. He was extremely good that night, and he stepped in front of me when Arthur came at me.

He was also the person who put us in that house and left me in it, and both of those are true, and it took four years and a dishwasher.

We are all right. I want to say that plainly. It was one bad month and some sessions with a woman in Milbrook and it is better now than it has been since before we moved in with them.

But I have stopped telling the story where he comes home and saves it.