“Okay, well, if you want to behave like a baby, I’ll have to treat you like one, and get you dressed the way I do with Petra.”

I picked up the clothes and advanced slowly towards the bed, hoping that a bit of warning might induce her to scramble up and get her clothes on, but she just lay there, making herself as limp and heavy as she possibly could so that my back screamed in protest as I began manhandling her into her clothes. She was as floppy as a rag doll, but a hundred times as heavy, and I was breathing hard when at last I stepped back. Her skirt was askew, and her hair was rumpled from where I had dragged the T-shirt over her head, but she was more or less dressed within the meaning of the act.

Finally, figuring that I might as well take advantage of her passivity, I pulled a sock on each foot and then jammed her school shoes on.

“There,” I said, trying to keep the triumph out of my voice. “You’re dressed. Well done, Maddie. Now, I’ll be downstairs eating Coco Pops with Ellie if you want to join us. Otherwise I’ll see you in the car in fifteen minutes.

“I haven’t done my teeth,” she said woodenly, nothing moving apart from her mouth. I gave a laugh.

“I don’t give a”—I stopped myself just in time, and then rephrased—“a monkey’s. But if you’re bothered . . .”

I went through to the bathroom in the hallway and put some toothpaste on the tip of the brush, intending to leave it up to her whether she brushed her teeth, but when I came back, holding the brush, she was sitting up on her bed.

“Will you brush for me?” she said, her voice almost normal after the sulky malice of a few minutes ago. I frowned. Wasn’t eight a bit old to be having her teeth brushed? What had the binder said? I couldn’t remember.

“Um . . . okay,” I said at last.

She opened her mouth like an obedient little bird, and I popped the toothbrush in, but I hadn’t been brushing for more than a few seconds when she twisted her head away from the brush and spat full in my face, a gob of minty white phlegm, sliding down my cheek and lips and onto my top.

For a minute I couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything, and then, before I had time to think what I was doing, my hand shot out to slap her face.

She flinched, and with what felt like a superhuman effort, I stopped myself, my hand inches from her face, feeling my breath fast and ragged in my chest.

Her eyes met mine, and she began to laugh, totally without mirth, a kind of joyless, cackling glee that made me want to shake her.

My whole body was shuddering with adrenaline, and I knew how close I had come to really letting go—slapping the smirk off her knowing little face. If she had been my own child I would have done it, no questions. My rage had been white-hot and absolute.

But I had stopped myself. I had stopped.

Was that what it would look like on the monitor, though, if Sandra had been watching?

I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Instead, I got up, leaving Maddie laughing that joyless, grinding laugh on the bed, and I walked shakily through to the bathroom, still holding the toothbrush, and with hands that trembled I wiped the toothpaste from my face and chest, and rinsed the flecks of spit out of my mouth.

Then I stood over the basin, letting the tap run, one hand on either side of the ceramic rim, feeling my whole body shake with pent-up sobs.

“Rowan?” The call came from downstairs, faint over the sound of running water and my own weeping gasps. It was Jean McKenzie. “Jack Grant’s outside wi’ the car.”

“I’m—I’m coming,” I managed back, hoping my voice didn’t betray my tears. Then I splashed water over my face, dried my eyes, and walked back into the bedroom, where Maddie was waiting.

“Okay, Maddie,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could. “Time for school. Jack’s outside with the car, let’s not keep him waiting.”

And to my unending shock, she got up calmly, picked up her schoolbag, and headed for the stairs.

“Can I have a banana in the car?” she said over her shoulder, and I found myself nodding, as if nothing had happened.

“Yes,” I said, hearing my own voice in my ears, flat and emotionless. Then I thought, I have to say something, I can’t let this go. “Maddie, about what just happened—you cannot spit at people like that; it’s disgusting.”

“What?” She turned to look at me, her face a picture of injured innocence. “What? I sneezed. I couldn’t help it.”

And then she ran down the rest of the flight of stairs and out to the waiting car, as if the bitter struggle of the last twenty minutes had been nothing but a figment of my own imagination.

I found myself wondering who had won in that encounter, as I checked Petra’s car seat and buckled myself in the front beside Jack. And then it struck me what a fucked-up dynamic this really was—that my relationship with this damaged little girl was not about caring and caregiving but about winning and dominance and war.

No. No matter what the outcome of that situation was, I hadn’t won. I had lost the moment I let Maddie make it into a battle.

But I hadn’t hit her. Which meant that, if nothing else, I had triumphed over my own worst instinct.

I hadn’t let the demons win. Not this time.

As the school gate clanged shut, I felt a kind of weak relief come over me, so that I almost sank to the pavement, my back to the iron railings, my face in my hands.