The realization hits him with force. The boyfriend doesn’t know. Her dark secret, and he doesn’t know. ‘I won’t say a word to him,’ he assures her, and sits there, staring at the door, for a long time after she has left, turning the knowledge over and over in his mind, like a pebble, considering every plane of its surface, its weight and heft. How to wield it to his own advantage.

She comes to help him with Charlotte’s things.

He wants to ask her what changed her mind, but decides not to. A change has taken place between them – a strengthening of their bond. She has told him things she has not told anyone else.

He’s relieved at her offer to help: the task fills him with a degree of dread. Something about Charlotte’s clothes seems to call her up from his memory in a way that is far more real than when he is alone in the rooms downstairs. She had loved her clothes, loved the pageantry of them – an outfit for every occasion – and he had indulged her. There was a time when he had thrilled to see her delight in an Hermès scarf brought home from a business trip, or a Furla bag on their anniversary. He recalls waiting outside the little cubicle in Brown Thomas while she tried on the Diane von Furstenburg dress, a little furrow of doubt appearing in her brow as she scanned the price-tag, saying, ‘It’s a small fortune, Anton,’ and the sheer joy that transformed her features when he said, ‘Go on. You only live once.’ He paid for his pleasure, you might say. How many of those possessions were bought as an appeasement or a distraction? The price of a guilty conscience.

Charlotte would have been fifty-five now, if she’d lived. Hard for him to imagine that. Always, in his mind, she is thirty-seven. Still a young woman, hints of age starting to creep up on her: the grey threading through her hair, swiftly banished; the silvery lines running over the skin of her breasts; the softness of flesh over her belly. He can recall quite clearly the way she’d sat at the dressing-table here in their bedroom, peering at her reflection in the mirror with dissatisfaction, her index fingers pulling taut the skin around her eyes. He’d found magazine cuttings for plastic surgery tucked away in one of her drawers.

‘So many dresses,’ Leah says, taking each one carefully from the wardrobe and laying it on the bed.

He watches the way she smooths the fabric, reverence in the manner of her touch. She folds the sleeves over the breast of one, and it reminds him of a body laid out on the bed, an image he tries to shake off.

‘Clothes were her passion,’ he tells her. ‘She used to work in a fashion store. Quite upmarket. It’s how we met.’

‘Oh?’