It took a long time and, in the end, I was almost sorry it was over. He pulled out, pulled himself away from me, over to the wall, sitting there, his head in his hands. I saw my own blood on his hands, his face. Then I heard him sob. I pulled myself gingerly up to a sitting position.

‘What am I doing?’ he said, his voice broken. ‘Oh, my God. What the hell…?’

I looked at him and he was actually crying.

I inched my way over to him, every bit of me sore. As he cried, I found myself sitting next to him, the wall for support, and I slipped my arm around his shoulders. He put his head against my neck, the tears from his face sliding down my skin. I put my ruined right hand, three fingers now fat as sausages and numb, cold, on the side of his cheek. ‘Shh. It’s okay.’ My voice sounded distorted, my lip split and swollen. ‘It’s okay, Lee. It’s alright, really.’

He cried against me for a long time, while I held him and wondered whether, actually, I was going to be all right after all.

‘I’ll get locked up,’ he said, his breath coming in rasping sobs, ‘they’ll put me away for this.’

‘No, they won’t,’ I soothed. ‘I won’t say. We’ll be all right, honestly. Just you and me.’

‘Really?’ He looked up at me like a child.

I wondered if he could even see my ravaged face. Did I look suitably comforting? How could he possibly imagine that anything was ever going to be all right again?

I had to continue down this path – it was my only chance. ‘You have to let me clean up a bit.’

‘Of course.’

To my surprise, he got up and left the room.

I crawled across the landing to the bathroom, found my way into the shower and stood there, seeing the blood diluting as it washed away, swirling into patterns against the white enamel that were almost beautiful. I rinsed the piss out of my hair, trying not to watch as clumps of it came away in my fingers and blocked the plughole. My skin stung; my right hand was still useless. I wondered what would happen if I had broken bones in my hand and they weren’t fixed.

Fortunately the towel in the bathroom was the navy blue one, not one of the white ones, so the blood that dotted it as I dried myself gingerly was not too noticeable. I was bleeding from between my legs. Probably my period, I thought, which had been overdue. I’d not thought about it, putting it down to the weight I’d lost, the stress, the fact that I wasn’t eating regularly. Maybe it had been brought on by the trauma.

It was as though all this was happening to someone else. I went into the bedroom and found some sanitary towels, knickers, clothes to wear, jeans, a belt, a loose jumper. I could have run away, right then. I could have run out into the street, shouting for help.

But that was just it. I couldn’t run. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t call the police, could I? He was one of them. They would look at me, and he would invent some story about me being traumatised by some incident he’d been working undercover on, how I was showing signs of mental illness and he’d been trying to help me. They’d take me to hospital, patch me up, and then I’d end up sectioned. Or worse, they’d send me home. With my left hand, I made a half-hearted attempt to clean up the blood in the spare room. It was everywhere – walls, carpet, smeared over the door. I gave up in the end, and went downstairs.