‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. That weekend. He changes the subject.’

Jules and Paul were separated now and he was subletting a flat near to the house while they waited for the sale to go through. They were at the whim of their buyer, the capricious Mr Legg, who every few weeks would come up with another issue with the house that bothered him and try to use it as leverage to negotiate a reduction in price (which Jules and Paul would politely refuse). They could have called his bluff and given him a deadline to exchange but neither was in any hurry to. They were still married and Paul hadn’t asked her to divorce, as a favour to her really, she supposed, since it made it easier for him to be in control of her finances. It was her idea, to put Paul in charge, something he initially resisted, but when she had been in therapy for two months, and was regularly attending meetings, he agreed. She lived on an allowance and if she needed anything extra she emailed Paul and the money immediately appeared in her account. She didn’t feel controlled or subjugated, as she might have expected to; she felt empowered. She had sold her car, which had cleared a large chunk of debt, and taken out a consolidation loan to pay off the rest. The first thing she tried to pay back was the ASD charity money to Ralph but he refused to take it, looking embarrassed. ‘What?’ she pressed. ‘Jules, it was Paul,’ he said sadly. Of course, she thought, of course. It would take a long time to clear the rest of her debts on just her base salary, but she was enjoying the lower demands of her new role box-ticking in compliance, and the extra time it afforded her to think and piece her life back together; the things she had been running from all along.

They had dinner together once a week, trying a different restaurant each time, alternating whose turn it was to pick. It was like dating, but at the end of a relationship rather than at the beginning; a wind-down in feelings, rather than a ramping up. Not that her feelings for Paul had ever dissipated, nor did she believe they ever would. She loved him and that’s why she had to let him go. She had hurt him too much. She’d read an article about twin brothers; one had died and the remaining twin’s heart was so broken, so bruised emotionally, that it had left physical scarring, evident on a scan. But hearts could be fixed, apparently. A few years on and a scan detected that the bruising had subsided. She often thought of Paul’s heart, and the damage she had inflicted, and whenever she was tempted to lay a hand on his over the table, or look at him in a certain way, she thought of his heart instead and she imagined it healing, scars melting and fading, the colour returning. She wanted his heart to be the way it was when she met him: healthy and whole, strong and open, walking into the ocean beside her with his arms held wide.