‘I deserved it, okay?’ The defiance in his voice dies, a shame-filled tone slinking in as he admits: ‘He caught me on the couch with his girlfriend.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘I know, I know. Stupid, right? But I just –’

He breaks off, shaking his head, and Anton sees how close to tears he is, and softens towards the boy. How lost and confused he looks.

‘Let me make some tea,’ Anton says gently.

As the kettle boils, it all comes spilling out: how Mark had stupidly, recklessly fallen for Katya with her Slavic beauty, her shrugging coolness, her unattainability. Unrequited love was bad enough but it was agony when the object of your desire was sleeping with your flatmate. He described the mornings, after Jason had gone to work, how he’d loiter in the kitchen waiting for her to appear, talking for a few minutes over coffee and then she’d leave. Those few minutes were all he had to feed his desire and sustain him through the cold loneliness of his one-sided romance.

‘I felt she understood something,’ he tells Anton now. ‘Like I could talk to her about anything, stuff I never shared with anyone.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ Anton asks, wary of the answer.

‘About you. About where you’ve been.’

They are dangerously close to touching upon Anton’s years of incarceration, a no-go area for both of them. It has been an unspoken contract between them – a tacit agreement not to discuss prison, or the reason why Anton was put there. Without ever articulating this need, it was nonetheless agreed that both of them would maintain the fallacy that his prison stay was without violence or personal danger. A fallacy bolstered by Anton’s insistence on substituting ‘hotel’ for ‘prison’. Whatever nightmare scenarios Mark had dreamed up over the years about prison brutality, they never discussed them. In the same way, they avoided discussing Mark’s mother. What happened to her.

‘I told Katya I was the one who found Mum that morning,’ Mark says now, and Anton can hear him fighting the emotion that’s rising in his voice. ‘But the thing is I can’t actually remember it. The memory is just gone. Have you any idea how frustrating that is?’

‘Son –’

‘It kills me to think that I was there but I just can’t remember. Katya suggested I try hypnotherapy to try to access that memory, and do you know what? I did. I went to see this hypnotist, told him I wanted to try to get back to that moment so that I might understand it better – accept it, even. But when he brought me back there, that point evaded me.’

Anton listens to this, full of fear. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, frightened of what he might blurt out.