I let him run. When he’d finished, I cleared my throat. “I don’t know, Oliver, really I don’t know. All those pictures you sent. Remember? I want to find the things behind them.”

“What things?”

“The things behind the pictures. I can’t see them because the pictures are in the way.”

“You’re not making any sense.” He sighed. “Listen, take a holiday if you have to. But you’ve worked so hard. Don’t throw it all away. We can talk about your hours. Money. Work-life balance or whatever. Are you listening, Andrea?”

“Yes.”

“Will you think about it?”

And I said I would. And I did, among other things.

David alive again in my head. Spectral company. Turning to gesture to the man selling coffee, legs stretched out from a red plastic stool. His face in shadow in the tiny Florentine chapel. David’s lips touching mine in a display bed in the empty IKEA.

I had always wanted magic from David, and he had supplied it, as best he could, with what he had. A part of me had reasoned that if there were people like Joe, blight men, wrecking balls, that there must exist the opposite. The ragged ancestors who raised the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge must have believed in magic, or why did they cart rocks weighing tens of tons from Wales to Wiltshire before the invention of the wheel? The early Christians shivered in their stone churches waiting for Viking marauders, believing in their God’s protection. I had needed magic too, but I had wanted David to perform a spell that only I was capable of. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

At night, I lay in bed in the vicarage spare room, fretting. I had the idea I might go south, to Cornwall, to the sea cliffs. I researched courses in climbing, battling the specter of Oliver laughing over my shoulder. I had a vision of myself, suspended on ropes over the foaming sea, stretching for a handhold somewhere high above. There, alone, I would find my nerve. I fed the image, and struggled to believe in it, held captive by the other images that came: of indifferent, much-younger climbers cold-shouldering me, of a sarcastic group leader, macho and posturing, an impatient man with an unkind laugh. Even when I imagined the ropes holding me, my thoughts turned to falling, to falling and not being caught.