He wheels the bike outside and she watches him carrying it up the steps, rain falling on him, darkening his clothes.

Then he is gone, and she stands listening to the loud patter of drops bouncing off the leaves of the magnolia, falling fatly and noisily on to the steps and all the hard surfaces around her.

After a minute, she steps back and draws the door closed.

It rains all night. She lies awake, listening to the patter of it on the window, on the concrete path outside. The wind moves through the magnolia, the tips of the branches brushing against the walls of the house. Overhead there are creaks and groans and she knows that it’s Anton, awake and moving around. This reminder of him arouses suspicion within her – did he betray her secret? Did he deliberately break his promise? Reason tells her he couldn’t have. Why would he? She has witnessed his contempt for those tabloid hacks so bent on twisting his own story. She has seen him cowering from them, frightened of being exposed to their vicious lack of scruples, their limitless appetite for gossip. No, it must be some other source. And then she remembers how they swarmed to the town after Cian’s death – the same tribe of hacks, bent on digging the dirt. Because of her age, they couldn’t print her name. But was it unreasonable to think that her details might still be on record, sitting in some database held by these people, for future use, the provision of context in future stories?

The night passes without word from Jake, and in the morning, she dresses herself and goes to work. At the office, several people remark on how pale and unwell she looks, but she is glad of the opportunity to lose her mind within the rigours of the familiar for just those few hours. On the train journey home, the doubts come flooding back.

She eats alone in the kitchen. The flat shrinks around her. Dampness in the walls, the tang of mould in her nostrils. She cannot seem to get warm.

When she tries calling Jake again, his phone is switched off. The message she leaves sounds weak to her ears, feeble, but she is running out of energy, disheartened by his silence, his refusal to speak to her. She tries to remember the last time she felt close to him, and what comes to her is the memory of a kiss when she lay in the hospital bed, scraped out and empty. She recalls the press of his lips against her forehead, the way he held her there. But the memory provokes a knot of grief, so she pushes the thought from her mind.