It hadn’t been easy to tell, at Christmas, what sort of shape James was in. To her concerned eye he had looked a little overweight and dishevelled, and he’d been evasive when she’d asked about his love life (while trying to avoid that phrase) and what avenues he might explore work-wise (while feeling she was twenty years too old for that phrase). Evasive, but not unhelpful. He’d got involved basting the turkey, chopping vegetables with so much force you’d think, as Lee said, that they’d done something terrible to him. When the Bradshaws had come round on Boxing Day with, as always, a new-smelling and complicated general knowledge board game, James had done his usual trick of getting the first five questions right and then deliberately playing less well when Mr Bradshaw began to get grumpy and swig the port like regular wine. She had glanced across, proud, wondering wherever he got all these facts from. But prouder still that he knew when not to use them. When James had left for London on the 29th, she’d taken both his hands in hers, her boy, and said, as always: look after yourself.

How empty that sounded in her head, now. And how negligent it felt, that she hadn’t seen James since Christmas. Nine weeks, ten? They went by so quickly. But of course she wouldn’t have let nine weeks go by if she had thought he needed something. Whatever was wrong, she could help him; that was the point. It was her job to help him. Yet she had somehow neglected that job. And now – without what felt like fair warning, without anything except this dizzying distress call in the middle of the night – now, things were on this knife-edge, and she felt sick.

She went back into the house. The cool past-midnight air had made her shivery, if anything. She went to fill the kettle. The kitchen felt smaller than it usually did. Jean took a deep breath, opened the dishwasher and began to make little piles of plates and bowls on the worktop, to be transferred into the cupboards. Just something to do that was normal. A neutral taste to offset the acid of this, of the thing there was no possible way of digesting. James has sent people a message that he might do something terrible. James has been talking about – something happening. She couldn’t even quite frame it as a phrase in her head.