The millennium dawned. I slept through it. Back at work, I didn’t see Marcus either. He was on-site, I was told, and he stayed there. But he came to the funeral. Peter was back at Oxford by then. He took the train down for the day, and during the service we stood, the three of us, in a line. I could feel Peter trembling on one side, Marcus as hard as wood on the other.

Songs from the old lady choir, all in tears, a eulogy from Em’s younger sister, Faye, Peter’s dad leading us out into the graveyard, the bit with the dirt. The startling stab of rage—that I was expected to say goodbye to her, now, with all these people watching, that I was expected to say goodbye to her forever, and then another stab, this time with Em herself. Em, you prick, you total prick. What were you thinking? Look what you’ve done to me! And you’re going to do it forever!

Afterward there were sandwiches in the back of The Green Knight. People from school sliding looks over. They were there. Say they don’t know anything. That she was just wandering about out there on her own and fell over.

Em’s mum came over and hugged all three of us.

“You’ll come by the house, won’t you?”

I promised that I would. Knew I wouldn’t.

“She’d made you all Christmas presents. She’d done tapes for you.”

When we left, she came and hugged me again, crying, her round face wet and wobbling. “I think she was out there hiding them again, so you could have another go at that game. That would be like her, wouldn’t it? Doing something nice for you all. What will we do without her, Andy? What will we do without our Em?”

I got in the van, into the back next to Peter, and Marcus drove us to the station at Great Bedwyn in silence.

As Peter slipped away, up the steps and onto the platform, I could see his eagerness to be off and I envied him. Back in Oxford no one had heard of Em, and its libraries and lecture halls and greens would be untainted by her and by the grief of those who had loved her, and at times he would, I imagined, be able to forget any of it had ever happened.

The darkness was coming in as we drove back in the rain, down the Roman road, through the ancient forest. I was in the passenger seat. At the lights in town, I stole a glance at Marcus and could see a tear flexing from the surface of his eyeball, until the light changed from red to green and he blinked and it broke. He didn’t take me home, he drove on, taking the Swindon road to Chiseldon and then up to Barbury Castle.