She made a vague motion towards her stomach. “He was pulling at me, here, at my pajamas—I guess he was trying to see … There was blood all over him but I couldn’t understand why, when I didn’t hurt anywhere. I went, ‘Conor, help me, you have to help me.’ At first he didn’t understand, he went, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ll get an ambulance,’ and he was trying to go for the phone, but I screamed. I grabbed hold of him and I screamed, ‘No!’ till he stopped.”

And the fingernail that had split as Emma fought for her life, that had snagged for an instant on the pink wool of her embroidered cushion, tore away in the thick weave of Conor’s jumper. Neither he nor Jenny had noticed—how could they? And later, at home, when Conor wrenched off his bloody clothes and threw them on the floor, he would never have seen that fragment falling away into the carpet. He had been blinded, seared, just praying that someday he would be able to see something other than that kitchen.

“I went, ‘You don’t understand. No ambulance. I don’t want an ambulance.’ He was going, ‘You’re going to be fine, they’ll get you fixed up in no time—’ He was holding me so tight—he had my face pressed into his jumper. It felt like it took me forever to get away enough that I could talk to him.”

Jenny was still watching nothing, but her lips were parted, loose as a child’s, and her face was almost tranquil. For her, the bad part was over; this had looked like a happy ending. “I wasn’t frightened any more. I knew exactly what needed doing, like it was all written out in front of me. The drawing was there on the floor, Emma’s awful drawing, and I said, ‘That thing there, take it away. Put it in your pocket and burn it when you get home.’ Conor jammed it into his pocket—I don’t think he even saw it, he just did what I said. If anyone had found it they could have guessed, like you guessed, and I couldn’t let anyone find out, could I? They’d think Pat was crazy. He didn’t deserve that.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.” But when Conor had found the drawing, later, at home, he hadn’t been able to burn it. This last message from his godchild: he had saved it, one final souvenir.

“Then,” Jenny said, “then I told him what I needed him to do. I said, ‘Here, here’s the knife, do it, Conor, please, you have to.’ And I shoved the knife into his hand.

“His eyes. He looked at the knife and then he looked down at me like he was afraid of me, like I was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. He went, ‘You’re not thinking straight,’ but I was like, ‘Yes, I am. I am’—I was trying to scream at him again, but it came out just a whisper. I went, ‘Pat’s dead, I stabbed him and now he’s dead—’