In the café overlooking the Great Court of the British Museum, I confessed there were times after Maddy died when I tried to whittle her down.

“Whittle?”

“Diminish her importance. I’d say to myself: Sixteen years ago, I didn’t know Maddy. Sixteen years from now it won’t matter so much. Isn’t that a terrible thing to do?”

“What else are you supposed to do?” he said softly.

Tears sat in my eyes so often during these conversations that I no longer bothered to hide them. “Then I think further ahead, when there’s no one left who knew her. Will it matter that she died?”

Antonio frowned and pulled in his chin. Finally he said: “I guess that’s why people invent God. A consciousness that remembers us forever.”

Didn’t he know I had been through every possible angle, from the preposterous to the vaguely scientific to the refuge of the imagination? Each held a grain or two of solace. But none in the end was any use. Across the table my confessor and seducer, the father of my child, waited for me to speak, and I was looking through him to a land so hideously parched and impassable there was no point in putting a single foot down.

“I don’t know if I can do it.” It dawned on me that, until this moment, I had believed the future was provisional, open to amendment.

“Invent God? Who can? When you know what we know about the human brain—”

“No!”

He frowned. “What, then?”

“Live the rest of my life without her.”

He reached over and enclosed my hands in both of his. I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me. He held my gaze, or cast his eyes around the room as he spoke. He said she’d made use of the time she had, which is all anyone can do. He said she was gone, but in a way, she never would be. He said she got her spirit and her strength from me. He said these qualities were what had drawn him to me in the first place, and they would see me through. I let him hold my hands and talk. I let the passion behind his speech, his endearing syntax, his certainty that he knew what I was capable of, pour over me as though it were some essential life-giving liquid, and what did not soak in now could be stored up for later.

•  •  •

The last of these evenings took place at the PizzaExpress in Holborn, where we’d first met. Earlier than usual, twenty after six under the milk-bottle chandeliers, I began: “Why do you think Maddy never told you she was sick?”

“Pride?” he said after a moment.

“That’s a harsh word.”