Lou’s words echoed like a voice crossing some forbidden land between dream and memory. Kelly pressed her hands under her arms to stop the fierce shuddering that rushed through her.

‘You asked if I fell for Gordon just like that,’ Kelly said. ‘I’m telling you.’

The night of her wedding—her intended wedding, her aborted wedding—came vividly before her eyes. She was curled on a bed, hiding from the audience, her face smeared with mascara and humiliation, and Gordon, in his ridiculous tuxedo, was the only guest with the courage to come and knock on her door. The others pretended they were protecting her, but they were avoiding her. She was cursed. And maybe Gordon had seen this too, which was what had prompted him to share his own curse. He told her about the afternoon he had been playing with Owen and Sam on the cliff. Everyone knew this about Gordon; it gave a solemn dignity to his silences, his passivity, his absorbency. He carried the load of Bluebird’s pity; with her wedding-day humiliation, he saw that it was a load Kelly now had to carry too. After he had been narrating the story for a little while, he had appeared to break into himself, pierce some locked inner door. He told her that he and Sam had lied about what happened to his brother. ‘You lied?’ Kelly said, lifted out of her misery into that of a little boy sitting beside her. Gordon nodded. His face looked turned inside out. He went into some kind of a trance, mumbling about his last sight of Owen … ‘that look on his face as he went’ … ‘yeah, like satisfaction’ … ‘that naughty grin he always had’ … ‘got him in so much trouble’ … ‘his arms out each side, like Christ’ … ‘he went backwards’ … ‘I can’t forget him smiling’ … ‘still don’t understand’ … ‘never forget that smile he had’ …

‘But why?’ Kelly had asked, her cancelled wedding a distant memory. ‘Why did Owen take his life?’

Gordon blinked at her as if she had slapped him out of his state and he had no idea where he was. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You said he was smiling when he jumped.’

‘I never said he jumped.’

‘So what did happen?’

Gordon had seemed, then, to shake himself from his dream, to backtrack, to unsay what he had said. Kelly pressed him, but he would not discuss it. Nor would he raise the subject, or allow it to be raised, ever again. Their silence became their glue. The intensity of that fixing between them, the sharing of their misery, had hardened into a bond she had thought would last for life. By coming to her that night of her humiliation, by opening up, even if momentarily, and showing her that she was not alone in her pain, Gordon had won her.

‘And that’s how I fell in love,’ Kelly said.