At my divorce hearing the judge ruled I’d leave with nothing. My husband leaned down and told me to see how long I’d last. Then the courtroom doors went.

I signed it because I had been trained. For thirteen years. Extremely thoroughly. By an entire system.

Never to look a good thing in the face.

And then I dropped out of Belgrave in the June of 2021, eleven weeks after I met Reeve Hale.

And I let that bursary lapse without making one telephone call to one person about it.

Severin Marrow sat in an office on the eleventh floor and watched that happen on a quarterly report dated the fourth of October, 2021.

Four lines of it.

And in the October of 2021 he instructed somebody at the Carrow Trust to contact me and offer a conversation about continuing support.

She rang me twice.

The eleventh of October and the nineteenth of October, 2021. Both times in the afternoon. The second one left a voicemail that I deleted without listening to.

I did not ring back either time.

Both of those calls are in my own telephone records.