Sharif looked at her sadly from his bed, and started strumming a melancholy tune. He loved Candida too much to tell her that they’d been having an incestuous relationship for months; he didn’t want to destroy her as he’d been destroyed. She didn’t deserve to be hurt that way.

‘No, sweetheart, you don’t deserve to know why,’ he said softly, regretfully, dropping his bravado for a moment.

Calmed slightly by his change of tone, Candida sat down next to him on his bed, and reached out to touch his stubbly cheek. ‘Sharif, darling,’ she entreated gently, ‘I do not accept this. I do not accept this break-up. I simply won’t, and that’s all there is to it. I’m going to stay here all day until you speak to me about what’s happened, so you may as well start speaking to me now.’

Sharif stopped strumming, then started picking out the thread of a haunting melody. ‘I guess I wouldn’t accept it either, if I were you. But that’s all there is to it. You kept telling me that it takes two to make a relationship work. Well, I know that it only takes one to break it up. So it doesn’t really matter whether you accept it or not. That’s just the way it is.’

Candida looked at him blankly for a minute, and then her smooth, lovely face crumpled into a wet, soggy mess of angry sobbing. ‘You bastard!’ she spat through her tears. ‘Why are you trying to hurt me so much? You promised that you would never hurt me, never leave me, never let me go. That’s what you said. You promised!’

Sharif watched her break down, with her head in her hands, and tears started running down his face, too. ‘I know I promised,5 he said miserably. ‘I’m sorry. Candida, please stop crying. I can’t do anything about it. I really can’t.5

‘Is this because I didn’t say “I love you?”’ Candida said suddenly, seizing at the cheap, forlorn hope that all their hurt could be whisked away with the three puffs of inconsequential air that she had so far withheld from him. ‘Because I do, you know I do. I love you, Sharif. I love you.’ She held her breath after saying the three little words, as though she really believed that they might have made everything better, as if by magic.

‘I know you do,’ Sharif said, shaking his head. The long-awaited words made no difference at all now. If anything, they probably made everything worse. Candida started sobbing again, with deep, guttural, choking tears, and Sharif just sat there, watching her, powerless to do anything about it. He had just broken the heart of the woman he loved and he couldn’t even tell her why; he couldn’t even let her know that his heart had been broken first.