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 grew up in care.

Four placements between the ages of five and eleven. Then a unit on Carrow Road from eleven until I was eighteen and they gave me a bag and a tenancy.

I have no family.

That is not a figure of speech and it is not self-pity. It is a fact, and it has been written on every single form I have filled in since I was about nine years old, in a box with four lines under it.

And at twenty-one I married Reeve Hale.

I left the course I was on, and then the job I took instead, because he told me he would look after all of it and because I believed him and because at twenty-one nobody had ever said that to me before.

Across that aisle he was sitting back in a chair with his arm over the back of it.