‘I’m not infertile,’ I blurt out before he asks. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t lie again.’

‘Why are you crying? I’m the one who should be crying.’ He exhales slowly. ‘Lie down on the massage bed.’

Gathering together all my energy, I say, ‘Please can I… do it myself?’ I point to the syringe.

‘You’d mess it up deliberately.’

‘I wouldn’t. I promise.’

‘If you do, I’ll use this.’ He waves the gun. ‘Not to kill you. I’d shoot you in the knee or the foot.’

‘I swear I’ll do it properly,’ I babble, desperate.

‘Good, because I’m going to be watching carefully. I’m not stupid. I’ll know if you’re trying to sabotage our family.’

‘No!’ Every nerve ending in my body is screaming a panic signal. I wish he had kept me unconscious for longer, for ever. He said he would kill me if I lied, so why didn’t I? Fear. Terror, not a desire to live, not like this. ‘Not with you watching. Please!’

‘No?’ He walks over to the window, turns his back on me. ‘You’re trying to take advantage of me. Everyone always does, because I’m soft. I never put my foot down. Do you think I don’t know that you’ve got all the power and I’ve got none? Do you think I might have missed that fact, so you have to rub my nose in it?’

‘I… I don’t know what you mean,’ I sob.

‘I need you more than you need me. Think how you’d feel in my position. You don’t need me at all, and you don’t want me. So I need a gun and a syringe, locks on all the doors. And now you’re asking me to leave the room, to entrust the most important thing in my world to you, when you’ve lied from the minute you got here. How is that fair? How is that right?’

‘If you let me do this, on my own, I’ll try harder to make it work. I promise. If you want me to help you, you have to start thinking about what I want and not just what you want.’

‘Why do you care so much?’ he snaps. ‘Why does this tiny detail matter so much? I’ve seen your body before, I’ve touched it, every inch of it.’

Something inside me is about to break. I can’t argue any more. There’s no point: in his mind, he has already won every possible argument we might have.

‘Let’s get it over with, for both our sakes,’ he says, picking up the syringe.

I walk towards the massage table.

‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Not the table this time. I’ve been looking on the Internet. There are better positions for conception than flat on your back. Look.’ On the carpet in front of me, he gets down on his hands and knees, holding the syringe between his teeth while his palms are flat on the floor. ‘Do that,’ he says, standing up. ‘Right. Good.’

I stare at the stripy carpet, list the colours in my head: grey, green, rust, gold, orange. Grey, green, rust, gold, orange. Nothing happens. I don’t feel his hands lifting the bottom of the dressing gown he made me put on after my clothes became too much of an inconvenience to him. Why is he taking so long?

For a beautiful moment I imagine he has died, that if I turned I would see him upright, grey and cold, eyes staring emptily.

‘That doesn’t look right,’ he says, sounding irritated. ‘I know, let’s improvise a bit. Go as if to fold your arms, resting your forearms flat on the carpet. No, not… yes, that’s it. Excellent. And then-final stage-shuffle forward on your forearms so that your body sort of stretches, so that your bottom’s higher in the air than the rest of you. That’s it. Stop. Perfect.’

Grey, green, rust, gold, orange. Grey, green, rust, gold, orange.

Darkness falls down on me. I twist my head to look up, see a layer of fabric. Not the ceiling. I feel air on my legs and back. He has pulled up the dressing gown, thrown it over my head. I begin to weep. ‘Wait! Look up male fertility on the Internet,’ I plead with him, but the words come out thick and indistinct. Only I know what I’m trying to say. ‘Four times a day is less likely to succeed than every two days. I’m not lying!’

He doesn’t answer.

I feel something brush against me. Not the syringe: something softer. Material. ‘Please stop,’ I beg. ‘There’s no point, not so soon after last time. It won’t work! Are you listening to me? I swear, I’m not lying!’

Thick, heavy breaths come from behind me. I close my eyes, steeling myself for the syringe, pressing my face into my arms. Seconds pass-I don’t know how many. I have forgotten how to count the speed at which my life is rolling away from me. Nothing happens.

Eventually, when I can’t bear it any more, I raise my head and turn. He’s holding the gun in the air. The bottom of his shirt has blood on it. ‘What…?’ I start to say.

He flies across the room at me. ‘You bitch!’ he screams. ‘Evil bitch!’ I don’t have time to move. I see the gun above my head, his hand coming down fast. Then a terrible crack, a burst of pain that wipes everything away.

When I come round, my arms and legs are twitching. That’s the first thing I’m aware of. I raise my hands to pat my face and head. Something around my eyes is the wrong shape. I find a lump above my right eyebrow, hard and huge, as if someone’s sliced open my skull and pushed a cricket ball under the skin at the top of my face.

My fingers are wet. I open my eyes: blood. That’s right: he hit me with the gun. I look around. Tears of gratitude prick my eyes when I see he’s not there. I don’t mind being in this room as long as he’s somewhere else.

Blood on his shirt. But that was before he hit me. Did he injure himself? How? Slowly, I rise to my feet. On the stripy carpet where I was lying, there is more blood. Nowhere near where my head was. I can’t bear to check in the most obvious way, not after what he’s done to me. I hobble over to my bag, pull out my diary and find the last page that I’ve marked with an asterisk. Then I count the days since then: twenty-nine. Oh, my God.

Knowing why he hit me frightens me as much as the click of the gun did. He can’t wait. That’s how mad he is. At some point in his life, he has lived with a woman and had a child; he must know exactly what the blood means.

He can’t even bear to wait five or six days.

Has he given up on me and gone to find another woman?

I try the door handle. Locked. I swear at myself, knowing how ridiculous it is to be crying with disappointment. For a moment I allowed myself to hope that he had left the house in a blind fury, forgetting to take his usual precautions.

I know he has gone out. I’m sure of it. He can’t stand to be around me, not now that I’ve let him down. I have to do something. I can’t wait for the milkman tomorrow morning. I must do something now.

Why do people say, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’? Most of them will never end up in a situation like mine, forced to remember the number of times they’ve trotted out that idiotic platitude.

I have never said it because I’ve never believed it, but now I have to. I have to make it true.

Breaking down the door would be impossible. It’s a thick one with metal inside, a fire door. It swings shut heavily unless someone-the man, William Markes-holds it open. That leaves the window. Double-glazed. I’ve looked at it hundreds of times and decided there’s no way I could smash it.

I have to try. I run from the opposite side of the room, throw my body at the glass six, seven times. It doesn’t move. I do it until my shoulders and arms feel as if they’re about to break. I slam my fists against the window and scream, hating it for its strength.

There is clouding on one pane. It’s been there since I got here, blocking a small patch of what is already a limited view. It never clears; funny, I haven’t noticed before. Moisture, trapped between the two panes of glass. Which means that, somewhere, the seal is broken.

Climbing up on to the massage table, I unscrew the white plastic light fitting above the bulb and release the cranberry glass shade. Then I swing my arm back and hurl it at the window as hard as I can. It smashes. I leap down from the table, run to the pile of glass and choose a shard with a thin, sharp edge. I think about using it to kill myself and immediately reject the idea; if I’d wanted to die I could have lied and let William Markes shoot me-it would have been easier.