Ask Nasreen why she has not left and she will give you four answers, and every one of them is true.

She has no money she can reach. She has one friend and she has not told her, because telling her makes it real and because Sara would want her to do something. Her mother would say to be patient and think of the children, and she is not certain her mother would be wrong.

And the fourth one, which she says last if she says it at all. She is not sure it is bad enough. Nothing has happened that she could put in a sentence. She has read about women who ended up in hospital and she is not one of them.

That fourth answer is the one the pattern installed. It is not her judgement. It is what four years of small explanations does to a person's ability to measure their own situation.