‘Come on, come on,’ she says, but as she presses and presses the buttons, the screen fails to light and she lets out a cry of frustration.

He is stretched out on the floor beside her, inert, and when his hand turns and brushes off her knee, she drops the phone and leans over him, saying his name with a new urgency. She presses her head against his chest, the blood pounding in her ears making it difficult to detect any other noise, but then she catches it – the faintest rhythm. A frail unsteady beat.

It spurs a new resolve within her, and she hurries out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, feeling her way through the dark until she finds a phone, an old prayer surfacing in her brain as she punches in three digits and listens to the dial tone.

Suicide. The word makes her shudder. She sits on a plastic chair in the hospital corridor, shivering, and tries hard not to think about the moment she discovered Anton lying there. Leah has found that, over the years, she has had some success with blocking out difficult events from her memory. The tricks she has learnt to stave off an attack of unwanted thoughts whenever she feels it coming upon her. Tricks like focusing on her breathing, or willing her mind to occupy a different thought, a neutral safe place.

Her clothes, she realizes, are soaked. She’s shaking like a drunk with delirium tremens. A nurse puts a blanket around her and gives her a plastic cup of milky tea.

‘He’s in the best place,’ the nurse tells Leah. She has a country accent, a rural warmth to her.

There’s nothing to do but wait. At Reception, they’d asked her for Anton’s details, but there was little she could tell them. She had no contact number for his next of kin, and her own phone was inert, rendered useless by water. They’d allowed her to use their phone, and she’d tried calling Jake, but his mobile was switched off. She wonders where he is, what he’s doing.

The tea helps and she closes her eyes, feeling a stillness entering her body, aware of the hard plastic of the chair beneath her. The past is tugging at her, and tonight, as she waits, she allows herself to go back there, to another time, another place, when she was a different person, her whole life ahead of her.

She was fifteen the summer it happened.

‘Are you sure, now, Leah?’ Mrs Hannigan had asked, and Leah had said, yes, she was sure, then laughed because Mrs Hannigan had already asked her that three times.

‘It’s just for Saturday. And we’ll leave early enough so we’ll be back by midnight – one at the latest.’

‘There’s no rush,’ Leah had said. ‘Honestly.’