Mark would be away, filming a commercial overseas, and he was worried about leaving his father alone. ‘Terrible timing,’ he had told her. ‘What with everything.’

‘These things can’t be helped.’

The conversation took place in the kitchen of the big house, their tones hushed as though Anton might be listening. Downstairs, in the basement flat, two workmen were re-plastering the rooms at the back where the water damage lay.

‘It goes without saying,’ Mark said, ‘that I won’t be charging you rent this month.’

‘Oh. Well … thank you. Are you sure? I mean …’

‘How could I in all conscience? The mess of the place – it’s hardly habitable.’

In the immediate aftermath of the event, Jake had wanted them to move out.

‘But where would we go?’ Leah had asked, on her knees picking up bits of detritus and dumping them in a bucket. Between them, they had carried their sofa outside into the garden, along with the mattress from Matthew’s bed, hoping that the good weather would hold and they could dry out in the sun.

‘We’d find somewhere. I’ll send out word. Someone will give us a sofa or a floor.’

But Leah didn’t want to go back to that. She would rather stay and face the discomfort and intrusion of the clean-up than subject themselves to the insecurity of sofa-surfing, reliant on the temporary goodwill of friends.

‘Besides,’ Mark says to her now, ‘after what you did for Dad that night, I really owe you.’

‘I’m just glad I was there,’ she answers truthfully.

‘It must have been awful,’ Mark says, his eyes fixed on her in a way that made her go very still. ‘Finding him like that. It must have been a terrible shock.’

She shrugs, made embarrassed by the sombreness of his tone, but also flushed at the memory of that night.

Yes, it had been shocking. Frightening, even. But there was also something about it that had felt … intimate. She had pressed her ear to his bare chest, found the faint heartbeat. In the ambulance, she had stroked his hair.

‘And, look, I’m sure he won’t try anything again,’ Mark tells her. ‘He’s still a bit low, but he seems quite stable. Remorseful, in fact.’

As he led her up the stairs, she could not help but think back to the previous time she had been there, the confusion of darkness and water, the fear that had drummed in her veins.

And now she stands in the doorway, looking past Mark to where Anton is crouched in his bed. She is shocked by what she sees: how thin and pale and hollow he looks, the skin on his face dry as tissue.

‘Ah. It’s my saviour,’ he croaks when he sees her.