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I study Nick carefully. I’m sure he never loved me, not really, despite what he’s saying now, or what the newspaper reports have said about me and him. But he glances at me anyway, and I see his cheeks flush.

‘Continue,’ Judge Reece says.

‘Yes, I thought she had a secret,’ Nick admits. ‘And I wanted to know it. I thought it was a game at first. I teased her by holding the letter out of her grasp, just a bit of fun, like the night before…’

I can’t help rolling my eyes. A game? Perhaps I have always been a game for Nick. A game he didn’t realise I’d stopped playing, and when I backed off, he just ramped up his gameplay. I glance at his neck, where I kissed it, bit it. It all seems so long ago.

‘I was angry she didn’t tell me,’ he adds.

Here’s some truth. Will he be brave enough to tell it all, how he came to my house at night, stalked me?

‘But my anger was nothing compared to hers,’ he says. ‘I learned that pretty fast.’

He tells the court how I flipped. Of course, he does. I watch the jury as he describes how I threatened him with the kitchen knife, how I used it on him. I see the sympathy on their faces. But when he says he was scared for his life, I see a glimmer of truth in his expression. Now I feel bad. Nick was never the root of the problem—I understand that more clearly now. Even what he did next, well, I suppose someone had to expose me. I couldn’t hide forever.

A photograph appears on the screen behind him, one Nick took on his phone, of the scratch I made on his cheek. I force myself to stare at it: the mark doesn’t seem particularly big. And when I look at Nick now, I can’t see a scar.

‘This was just another way in which Kate was trying to make me like Tyler MacFarlane,’ Nick says. ‘Cutting me, putting his scar onto,into, me. She was branding me.’

He gestures to his cheek, to his non-existent scar. If I’d really wanted Nick to look like you, I would have pressed harder.

Another picture appears, this time of you, old you. Mr Lowe zooms in on the scar on your cheek: the scar you told me had come from when you were chased into the desert, and you ran and fell, and then you were punished. A technician adjusts the images until they sit side by side, the two scars side by side, both left cheeks, you and Nick a couple now. Nick, the fancy banker. You, the dirtbag. You, who wanted the good life, to touch the land each morning andnight. And Nick, living the fantasy of money and deals in the city. Maybe we are all fantasists of one sort or another.

The picture of you snaps off, and only Nick is left on the screen. As Mr Lowe keeps prodding, Nick talks about the violence within me, what I am capable of, what the act of knifing him suggests I could also do. I wait for Nick to glance my way again. But he doesn’t. Does he feel any guilt towards me, or does he simply not care anymore? He’s in the spotlight now, being heard, and maybe a part of him likes it.

During your trial all those years ago, you looked at me the whole time. Do you remember? Which is why, of course, it felt so awful when I told the court what the police and my parents expected to hear, that you kidnapped me and held me by force, that you drugged me. When I told them we hadn’t run away together, that I hadn’t been compliant—not in the way you described me in your story. It felt like I was killing you in that courtroom. And here I am, being accused of killing you again.