He’s waiting with his arms held wide as she opens the door. Wordlessly, she steps into them.

‘Oh, my darling,’ Anton says softly, folding her into his embrace. ‘Oh, my poor sweet darling.’

AUGUST

23

Anton

Intimacy.

That is the word, Anton decides. The word he has been hunting around his brain for, the word to describe it.

He stands in a queue, waiting. Ahead of him, a woman is sampling olives while a young bearded man in a long apron stands poised for her decision. There’s a breeze ruffling the awning overhead and a little dog keeps sniffing around Anton’s ankles – a tiny brown slinky thing, like a rodent on a lead. Anton smiles at the dog’s owner. ‘Busy today,’ he remarks.

‘It’s the good weather. Everybody flocks here.’

The woman goes for the Kalamatas, picking through her purse for coins as the young man weighs and prices them.

Anton looks at the wooden troughs glistening with various olives sweating in the heat of the August Sunday morning, and wonders whether Leah might prefer the Kalamatas or the stuffed Cerignolas. A thrill goes through him, like a volt of electricity, when he thinks of her, at this very moment lying in bed in his house, waiting for him.

‘Have you tried their salted almonds?’ the dog-owner asks him now. ‘Amazing. Very moreish, do you know?’

Anton makes a vague humming sound of approval, then turns back to the counter.

Moreish. A word he’s not familiar with. A word that seems to have sprung into existence during his years inside. Moments like this feel extraordinary to Anton, where he finds himself vividly present in the normal world once more, all his senses engaged, after so long starved in the darkness. Having a conversation with a stranger, being among these crowds of normal people, with this cornucopia of exotic foods spread in front of him, knowing that she is at home, right now maybe sitting up in bed, stretching.

He buys Kalamata olives, anchovies, a Barolo salami, some salted almonds, puts them all in the cloth bag slung over his forearm, then drifts into the crowd. For weeks, he has been avoiding situations like this, shying away from the masses for fear of being overwhelmed, consumed. It’s something he hadn’t expected – how even after you’d left your cell behind, still you carried the confines within you. That cell, meant to keep the law-abiding public safe from you, becomes over time the thing that protects you from the outside world, a curious reversal. The very confinement you dreaded at the start becomes a need, a vital limitation. A few weeks ago, visiting the Sunday market would have been an impossibility for him. But now everything is different.