She searched amongst the papers on the table and found her old Nokia, thumbed through the handful of contacts and stopped at Thomas. She looked at his name for a few seconds then called, pushing her glasses onto the top of her head. She drank whisky and sat back in her chair, then pinched the bridge of her nose and listened to the ringing.22

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Thomas, it’s Dorothy.’

‘It’s a little late.’ He sounded sleepy. ‘Are you OK?’

She glanced at the clock on the wall, 1 a.m. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘What’s up?’

They’d been friends for five years, since he came to her yoga class. He’d attracted everyone’s attention, any man at a yoga class gets attention, especially a tall black man with an accent drifting between Scotland and Sweden. When the women discovered he was a police officer it was too much. Dorothy liked him straight away, he was softer than the Scottish men she knew, despite being a cop. Two months after that first class she bumped into him on Chambers Street and they went for coffee. It felt good to be talking with a man who wasn’t her husband. Nothing more than that.

Then two years ago Thomas’s wife Morag died suddenly. A heart attack while riding her bike through Southside traffic, she hit the kerb and bounced into a parked van. The Skelfs did the funeral. Wasn’t too much of a reconstruction job, would’ve been much worse if she’d fallen into an oncoming vehicle. Thomas and Morag didn’t have kids and all his family were in Sweden, so Dorothy helped out and they became close. Jim knew they met for coffee and maybe he thought it was strange but he never said anything.

Thomas’s grief gradually subsided, a scenario Dorothy had seen a hundred times before. She wondered about her own grief. It was so individual for each person, she knew that well from the business. After the initial shock of finding Jim she’d wallowed for days. Arranging the pyre had focused her, but it also made her kind of numb. Again, she’d seen that so often with clients. She wondered when the waves would hit, how bad they would be, how deep she would go. But she would survive, everyone did, and the pain would reduce with time. That was almost as unbearable, the knowledge that the grief, along with her memories of Jim, would fade.

‘Jim’s dead,’ she said.23

‘Oh, Dorothy.’

She rubbed at her forehead. ‘Heart attack.’

The words hung between them, giving them a link to each other, both their partners killed the same way.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Thomas said.

‘It happened a week ago,’ Dorothy said, swirling the whisky in her glass. ‘During the night, while he was on the toilet. I found him in the morning. Where’s the dignity in that?’