It was sunny and almost warm, so we got the Tube down to the river and walked along the South Bank until we were too tired to walk any more. We sat on a bench outside Tate Modern and drank hot tea out of disposable cups. It felt like the first day of spring.

‘When I came to see you at the hospital on Thursday, I thought I saw someone I knew.’

‘Lee?’ he asked.

‘No. Someone else. Sylvia.’

Stuart leaned forward on the bench, his head turned to me. ‘Who’s Sylvia?’

I’d been thinking about this ever since Thursday: telling him. Thinking of how I could explain it.

‘She was my best friend before all this happened. She moved to London because she got this amazing new job.’

‘You lost touch with her?’

I nodded. ‘Well, it was more than that, really. She didn’t believe me. When things started to go wrong with Lee, I tried to tell her about it. I needed her to help. I don’t know why she didn’t. In the end I didn’t contact her again.’

He waited for me to continue, putting his cup down onto the paving stone under the seat, the steam coming off what was left of his tea, curling up in beautiful patterns.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, you know.’

‘What I said?’

‘About… the kiss.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you’d even been listening, to be honest.’

‘It took me a bit by surprise, that’s all. I thought you weren’t interested in me.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘I must be better at hiding my feelings than I thought.’

There was a pause while I tried to work out what to say next.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about it. I know it’s a difficult time for you at the moment. I don’t want this to stop us being friends.’

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I need to tell you about it. I need you to understand what happened to me. You can’t decide how you feel until you know.’

‘What – right now?’

I nodded. ‘It’s better out here,’ I said. ‘I won’t fall apart out here, with all these people walking past.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘It’s bad.’

‘Yes.’

I took a deep breath. ‘It was a bad relationship. It got worse and worse. In the end he nearly killed me.’

There was a long pause. He looked at me, looked at his hands. Eventually, he said, ‘Someone found you?’

‘Wendy. She lived next door. I must have given her such a shock.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘Sorry you went through that.’

‘I was pregnant when he attacked me. I didn’t even know it until they told me afterwards in the hospital that I’d lost the baby. I don’t know if I can have children now. They said it was unlikely.’

He looked away.

‘I had to tell you that,’ I said.

Stuart nodded. I realised he had tears in his eyes. I put my hand across his back. ‘Oh, God, please don’t be upset. I didn’t want you to be upset.’

He put his arms around me, pulling me into a crushing hug, and we stayed like that for several moments.

‘Do you know what the worst thing was?’ I said at last, into his shoulder. ‘It wasn’t sitting in there, in that room, waiting for him to come back and kill me. It wasn’t being hit, it wasn’t the pain, it wasn’t even being raped. It was that afterwards nobody, not even my best friend, believed me.’

I sat back then, looked out at the river, a barge going slowly past, downstream. ‘I need you to believe me, Stuart. I need that more than I’ve ever needed anything in my whole life.’

‘Of course I believe you,’ he said. ‘I’ll always believe you.’

Stuart wiped away the tears with his finger and moved to kiss me. I put my fingers to his lips. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Think about what I’ve told you. I need to know you can deal with it.’

He nodded. ‘Okay.’

We got up and started walking back towards Waterloo Bridge. ‘Why didn’t she believe you?’ he asked. ‘She doesn’t sound like much of a best friend.’

‘It’s the way he was. He could charm anyone. He was nothing but charming with all of my friends. They just thought I was being ungrateful, that he couldn’t possibly be all the things I said he was. Then he started talking to them when I wasn’t there, telling them things about me that weren’t true. He was talking to Sylvia, my other friends were talking to her too, about things that he’d told them. Before I knew what was happening, they were all busy discussing how I’d gone completely mad.’

In front of us a little boy, running to catch his older brother, fell over onto his knees. His mum picked him up and rubbed him down before he had a chance to start crying.

‘And you saw her? Sylvia?’

‘She was on that bus, heading south. On the top deck.’

‘Did she see you?’

‘She was staring at me. It was so strange.’

‘Does it worry you?’

‘What? Seeing Sylvia? I don’t think so. It just gave me a shock, seeing her. I never thought I’d see her again, and then suddenly there she was. I mean, I knew she was in London somewhere. But even so…’

We were nearly back at the Tube.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said. He pulled me into a hug.

I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.