Behind me, Dinah starts crying – a heart-rending wail of melancholy, of grief.

I’m so close to leaving and I can’t wait to go, but I can’t leave her like this, I can’t ignore her.

And so I turn and make that dread trudge down the smoke-hazed garden, dragging my reluctant shadow back to her.

She sees me coming. ‘What are you doing back here? I don’t need you! Leave me alone!’ She kicks a burning log back onto the fire.

But I can’t go. I owe her. All this time we’ve been together and I haven’t told her what she did for me, how much it meant. ‘I can’t, Dinah. You changed my life ten years ago,’ I tell her, ‘when we first met. I’ve never thanked you for it.’

Dinah’s silent, looking at me now, all darkness against the flames except for the steady light of her gaze. The wind shifts the smoke towards us in the damp garden.

She puts the stick down and leans on it heavily, weighed down with age and emotion. She shields her eyes from the glow of the window. ‘No. You and me? We met before?’

‘Yes. In Stables Market. It was a sunny May morning. Warm. The cobbles were gleaming like black pearls. It was sleepy at that time of the day; many of the stalls weren’t even open yet.’

‘It’s true; I like it best in the morning,’ she agrees.

‘Yeah. Me, too.’ That’s something we share. ‘I hadn’t slept. I’d been worrying about my future, after uni. They tell you that you can be anything you want, that there are no limits to what you can accomplish if you put your mind to it, but it’s not true.’ I can feel the pressure of failure crushing me like I felt it then. ‘I’d seen a dress in the market. It was beautiful and it lifted my spirits. It was the one thing that reassured me I still had some capacity for happiness. I’d gone to look at it three or four times and each time I was scared it would have been sold.’

‘You should have bought it!’

‘I couldn’t.’ The smoke stings my eyes. ‘I didn’t deserve it.’

‘Oh.’ She shifts position and her face is lost in the dark. ‘This dress, what did it look like?’ she asks keenly.

‘Sleeveless, with a lime green knee-length skirt and a turquoise bodice with a keyhole neckline. The neckline and hem have square-cut faceted turquoise crystals and the fabric, it’s two-tone, turquoise and green.’

‘I remember you!’ she says suddenly. ‘All in black and very annoyed when I looked at the dress, like you wanted to kill me. You hated it that an old lady talked to you.’