"In the eyes of the law he's done nothing wrong." The officer heaved himself up to leave. "Why should the man lose his job?"

"Wait. No, wait." Maeve couldn't let him go, not until he changed his mind. Because if he left now, with things as they were, they were stuck with them forever. "Can we appeal?"

He thought that was funny. "No, no, you can't appeal. DPP's decision is final and binding." Then he seemed to relent a little. "Mind you, you might be as well off, leaving things as they are. Awful lot of dirty linen gets washed in a case like this."

No one believed her.

She confided in Yvonne, her best friend from school. "David raped me."

"How could he rape you? He used to be your boyfriend. You already had sex with him."

She confided in Natalie. "David raped me."

"David doesn't need to rape anyone. He's a nice guy."

She confided in Jasmine, her ex-flatmate. "David raped me."

"But that's a terrible thing to say. He could sue you for that."

She stopped confiding in people.

But she was going back to work. In two weeks' time. Three weeks. At the start of next month. When her two-month certificate ran out. After the summer.

The panic attacks started. The first time it happened, she didn't even know what it was. All she knew, with absolutely certainty, was that she was about to die. Her heart was spasming in her chest, no air could get in or out and she didn't think she could survive the intensity of her fear. The same fear she'd felt on the floor of David's bedroom, his forearm lying so easily across her throat. The expectation of imminent death.

She became terrified of men, of their height, their strength, even a casual look in her direction.

She overate, both she and Matt did, shoving down the feelings with butter and sugar and sweetness. She put on weight, but not as much as she would have liked. She wanted to disappear into a roly-poly body, to become invisible in it, so that no one would fancy her ever again.

She couldn't be naked, not even alone. The touch of another human being, even Matt, stopped her from breathing. The last time she and Matt had had sex was on their honeymoon.

Her periods stopped. Her hair fell out. Her hands flaked, the skin sore with eczema. She couldn't sleep without the light on. By the time she finished reading a sentence, she'd forgotten the beginning. She barely spoke.

Fear was the only thing she felt. Otherwise, nothing. It was as though, when she'd spiraled outside her body that evening on David's floor, she'd never come back in again. Everything that happened to her . . . she seemed to see it almost like a movie. It was happening to someone else, another Maeve, not the real one.

Suddenly, around the four-month mark, things took an upward turn and Maeve felt confident enough to tackle going back to work. But on the morning that Matt drove her into the parking lot and she saw the entrance, she was seized with so much terror that her legs wouldn't support her. She couldn't get out of the car and Matt had to drive her home again. She'd tried too soon, and it was best to defer it until the following Monday. Or maybe the one after that.

A new home, Matt decided: that was the answer! A fresh start in a place with no horrible associations. Positive and energized, he visited an estate agent's, but Maeve found fault with every place he suggested and all Matt's enthusiasm drained to nothing, leaving him once more miserable and full of dread. Maeve was right. Better the devil you know. Keep the ship steady for the moment, and all that. And he had to admit it would have been a painful wrench to abandon the flat they'd bought, with such high hopes, to launch their married life in.

There was another reason to stay where they were. Money had become an issue. After six months' absence, Maeve's pay had been cut by half; now, a year on, it had been stopped entirely.

Then there was the garden-the back garden at 66 Star Street came with their flat. It had been the deciding factor in them buying the place because Maeve had been full of animated plans to grow foxgloves and carrots and tomatoes. "It's so easy! You'll see, Matt. We'll be self-sufficient before we know it!"

They were self-sufficient now, all right, but self-sufficient in the wrong way. They had no one except each other. All of their friends-all of them-had fallen away because they thought that Maeve had gone so weird, with her strange rape accusations, her insistence that this man was looking at her and that man was looking at her, and her drama-queen antics, the gasping and rocking backward and forwards and clutching her chest. Like, in public.

The social life that Matt shared with his male friends came to a halt because Maeve couldn't spend an entire night at home without him. She could just about handle it when he went to work things because she knew they had little choice: Matt's job was all that stood between them and complete penury.

The only person who remained sympathetic was Alex, Matt's brother, but, in the end, even he'd become wearied by Matt's chronic unavailability. "She's got to learn to be on her own sometime," he told Matt. "You're making it worse by always giving in to her."

Painful though it was to be rejected by people they'd previously depended on, there was a strange relief in it. They'd nothing in common with those people any more; their concerns seemed so trivial. To Maeve's eternal relief, she'd managed to keep her parents from knowing any of what had happened. Matt's parents were also in the dark. But putting on a show of normality in front of them was so exhausting that it couldn't be done very often. Her visits down home lessened, and two times out of three she faked sickness so that she didn't have to go to a Geary family do.

Burning them both up was the thought that David was walking around a free man while they were in prison.

Matt wanted to kill him. Actually really kill him. He saw him most days at work and he fantasized about following him home, lifting him from the street and bundling him into the back of a van, taking him to their flat, gagging him, binding him and making him suffer, making it last.

"I think about it too," Maeve said. "Did you know that a hit man costs only two grand. I Googled it."

"So did I."

But they agreed they couldn't take a contract out on David.

"It would only reduce us to his level," Maeve said.

"I don't care about that," Matt said.

And neither did Maeve. She was destroyed anyway. "But we'd get caught. We're the obvious suspects. We'd end up in prison. We can't let him ruin our life more than he has."

"I don't know how more people don't crack up and take the law into their own hands and just kill the bloke." Matt had discovered things he'd never before thought about: that only one in ten reported rapes make it to court; that out of them, only six in a hundred result in a conviction. And what about all the rapes that are never reported, because the girl is too scared. Of her rapist? Of the police? All those rapes unacknowledged, unavenged. It was enough to drive him mad. How was the world as normal as it was? How was all that rage and injustice and grief and fear contained?

When Matt saw that Maeve would never return to Goliath, that he didn't have to stay to protect her, he left too.

He had been determined that he wouldn't leave, that that bastard wouldn't drive him out, the way he'd got rid of Maeve, but he was tired of shaking with rage in meetings, of trembling so much that his fingers couldn't type if your man was in the vicinity. It was a point of pride that Matt never let David see any weakness, any reaction at all. In his head he tortured him lengthily and horribly but in real life he presented a bland nothingy expression. A show of imperturbability was all that remained to him, a paper-thin comfort, but something nonetheless.

As for David, there was no evidence of remorse or guilt. He never spoke directly to Matt but the smirk in his eyes said it all. You took her from me and I fucked it up on you.

Matt left Goliath and went on to bigger and better at Edios. Evidently, he could still do his job.

Both Matt and Maeve started taking antidepressants, then they began weekly appointments with Dr. Shrigley until Dr. Shrigley tried to get Matt to admit that sometimes he'd doubted Maeve's story, so Matt stopped going.

But he did doubt Maeve. Sometimes. How could he not? Everyone else doubted her and he was only human. At times he hated her. He'd feel irrational rage that she'd got raped, that she'd ruined everything.

It was almost two years before Maeve got a job, a tiny, tame little thing, gifted to her because she was the only applicant who would agree to the very low salary. A routine was the way to go, she realized. That would keep her safe. She kept things very small and very predictable, and sometimes she caught a glimpse of all that she had lost. Had she really been that person, that light-hearted innocent who'd loved everyone? Who had approached the world with a wide-open heart, as if life were a great, big, juicy red apple, just waiting for her to bite into it?

She'd had it all. Within the bounds of her ordinary life, she'd had nirvana. She'd been loved and she'd had friends, a job, ordinary decent happiness. And it was all gone.

They kept track of David. But Matt didn't know that Maeve did and Maeve didn't know that Matt did. Now and again, independently of each other, they showed up outside No Brainer, in the hope that David might be showing signs of remorse, but they always came away feeling worse.

Even at the most hopeless of times, Matt showed an occasional burst of his old optimism and came up with bright ideas to cure them: they'd take up horse-riding or hillwalking or badminton or-most frequent of all-they'd move house.

Nothing lasted and nothing worked.

"Time wounds all heels," Matt sometimes said to Maeve.

But somewhere along the way, three years had passed and they were still wounded and waiting.

Day 1 . . .

Conall hustled Lydia up the stairs and into his bedroom. He was desperate for her.

"What did you think?" Lydia shimmied out from under his grasp. "When you saw Matt in the bath?"

Conall tightened his lips. He didn't want to talk about it. When he'd opened that bathroom door, he'd been rooted to the spot with horror. Every one of his muscles had seized up and the backs of his calves had started cramping.

From all the blood and guts on the telly he'd expected to be inured to carnage, but CSI: Miami could never convey the power of a real dead person.

He kept seeing it again: the bath filled with Matt's blood; crimson blossoms swirling through the water; the waxy, lifeless face lolling on the taut red waterline.

"I thought he was dead," he said.

As he'd hovered in the doorway of that bathroom, the world felt like it had stopped turning, and battling with his horror was grief, a mesmerizing sense of loss at the waste of the young man's life.

In his time, Conall had done a lot of living: he'd driven expensive cars at shamefully reckless speeds; he'd taken risks in his career that could have cost millions; he had experienced a lot of beauty-magazine-style girlfriends, priceless art, the most scenic spots on the planet. But in that endless moment he understood that you only truly know the value of life when you're face to face with death. Life seemed so appallingly valuable he wanted to howl.

"You thought he was dead?" Lydia said. "Nasty."

"It's over now." At least he hoped it was, but his calves were spasming again. He reached for Lydia, but she backed across his enormous bedroom. He followed her.

"Why did you call for Katie?" Lydia asked. "To come and help you?"

"Because . . . she was the obvious person."

"What way obvious?"

"She knows about first aid."

"Owning seven different versions of Savlon doesn't make you a paramedic. I asked her in your so-called Flying Bottle-thanks for that, by the way. Really rub it in, your private joke, why don't you? Anyway, she knows zip about first aid."

Conall looked quizzical. "Your point?"

"You were scared, really, really scared and Katie was the one you wanted."

Elaborately, he rolled his eyes.

"Oh no," she said. "You don't do that to me. I'm not one of your sappy girls."

"I know you're not one of my 'sappy girls.' "

"No. I know I'm not one of your sappy girls."

"Okay." He said with elaborate patience. "You know you're not one of my 'sappy girls.' "

"You're not getting it, are you?"

He gazed at her, then something changed behind his eyes. "You're . . . breaking up with me?"

"Love of God, took you long enough. I can't believe your nerve, bringing me back here to have sex, when it's Katie you want."

"I don't want her. I want you."

"Love of God." She shook her head. "You haven't a clue. You'd want to cop on to yourself or you'll never be happy."

She disappeared into the bathroom and reappeared with a cluster of bottles-shampoo and things-and threw them into her bag.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting my stuff."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going, thick-arse. In case you have to explain to people what's after happening, here it is: I've broken it off with you. And no, we can't be friends. You don't really do friends, do you? Another thing you'd want to sort out. I'll be bad-mouthing you every chance I get. If there's a rumor going round town that you're a premature ejaculator, I'm the one who started it."

She opened the bedside cabinet, fished out a packet of condoms and slid them into her jeans pocket. "Mine," she said. Then she cast one last contemptuous look around the room, checking that she had everything, before swaggering from the room and thundering down the stairs.

The house shuddered when she slammed the front door behind her. Automatically, Conall reached for his BlackBerry. What was Lydia's problem? She was too much of an attack dog, that's what it was. How could you reason with someone like her? Katie had been the obvious person to call for. She was capable, she was an adult, she understood things, she was . . . well, simply obvious.

Four new emails had arrived, and he read them hungrily, clicking quickly from one to the next, but none of them did the trick. He didn't feel so good, everything seemed slightly surreal. Sort of nasty. He put on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, but there was so much loss in it that he changed to the Sex Pistols. All that frenzied guitar didn't feel good either. Madame Butterfly maybe, but two minutes of listening to that aching abandonment and suddenly he had tears in his eyes. He wasn't having that! In alarm, he shut it off. Silence was safer.

He lay on his giant bed, staring at the far wall. Time passed and, after a period of nothingness, he wondered if he should ring Katie. Just to find out what was happening with Matt.

Then he realized that Lydia was the one he should be ringing-apologizing, explaining, all that. There were rules, Conall knew. You weren't supposed to prefer your ex-girlfriend to your current one. But he didn't prefer Katie. It had been an emergency, for crying out loud: someone was dying, things needed to be done and done quickly. Katie had been the right person.

Or maybe Lydia was right, he admitted reluctantly. Maybe she was the one he should have called for. But she was so hard and what he'd needed, in those moments when it had seemed like the horror was going to overwhelm him . . . what he'd needed right then, was soft.

Day 1 . . .

"Into the pillow," the nurse said. "Do it into the pillow, or you'll have to leave."

Maeve looked up. Her face was hot and sore with salt and her eyes were so swollen she could barely see. Another surge of uncontrollable feeling rushed up through her.

"Pillow!" the nurse said. "There's other people here. They're upset too."

Maeve doubled over and buried her face into the pillow, which had appeared from somewhere, and shrieked, "How could you do this to me? How could you leave me here all alone? I will never forgive you."

When she'd finally understood what Matt had done, she'd landed with an almighty bump back in her body, back in Maeve. It was like that suddenly present, super-real sensation when your ears pop on a plane. She was alive and in agony and blind with fury.

A red-curtained screen-on-wheels had been wrapped around Matt's trolley, in an attempt to give them some privacy from the rest of the ER. Maeve sat beside him on a hard, hospital chair. His wrists had been stitched, taped and swaddled in pristine white bandages; he'd been given 4 liters of blood and 2 liters of electrolytes. Wires connected him to drips and green beepy monitors. He looked at death's door but he was going to live.

"You must really hate me to do that to me!"

His eyes were closed, he looked unconscious, but she thought he was faking it.

"As soon as they let you out of this place, you get yourself straight round to our flat and move your stuff out." She lifted her face from the pillow, she couldn't stop herself. "Go to a hotel, move in with your parents." She tasted blood at the back of her throat. "I don't care where you go."

"Pillow!"

Fionn paced up and down in the hospital car park. The ER was like the waiting room in hell, with its clusters of injured people crying and wailing, trailing entourages. Someone had given Jemima their chair, but there was nowhere for him. Not that he was able to sit, he was too agitated. He was feeling bad. Angry, actually. First with Jemima for insisting that he escort her to the hospital, leaving Katie with that territorial Conall. And, secondly, with Maeve for treating him like the anti-Christ. Somewhere during this evening's dramatic events, he'd realized that the emotion which used to light up Maeve's face at the sight of him wasn't awe. It was fear. Terrible paralyzing fear. He felt foolish, really quite sore, that he'd thought she was mad about him. And why wasn't she? Everyone else loved him.

They'd been here for hours. He wasn't sure how long but it was properly night now, good and dark.