Stay in touch, she thought, jabbing at James’s number the moment Karl’s name disappeared from the screen. How many times you ended up saying that. Staying in touch was exactly what she hadn’t done, though. Not with James, not with Karl; with hardly anyone from the London life. It was a healthy thing, her therapist had said. To commit to this new life. To live fully in it. Her therapist had said that all sorts of decisions made by Michaela were healthy; it was one of the reasons Michaela was happy to pay her eighty euros a week (non-refundable if cancelled). But this was what happened when you were ‘out of touch’. Someone you’d travelled with, someone who’d seen you on the toilet in a reindeer onesie, who’d told you all about his abusive father, things he had never told anyone, now no more than the voice at the other end of a panicked call, a fellow eyewitness, who had gone back to being a stranger in the silence after they said goodbye.

And someone you had lived with, slept with, loved, now wanting to be dead, perhaps already having taken his own life, while you’d been out drinking with the person who replaced him.

Of course, that was a harsh way of putting it. In the long run she believed that James would find someone else – she absolutely believed that. She’d even had the odd daydream in which she and Phillip, James and this notional but absolutely more-suited-than-Michaela new partner, hung out by the canal and exchanged light chat on a subject the daydream didn’t supply. It might be better to let go of thoughts like that, the therapist had said; they suggest a part of you hasn’t yet left the old relationship. And Michaela had largely let them go, but she wasn’t paying the therapist €80 a time to tell her what she was allowed to think about in the bath.

Harsh or not, she had left James, and now he was talking about leaving her, leaving everything. She tried the number once more and then, the second the recorded voice began, dropped her phone onto the worktop and rested her head in her hands.

*

Karl shivered as a heavy goods vehicle went by, European phone numbers plastered all over its long body. He clutched himself around the ribs, as if hugging someone else for warmth. He opened the door gently and slid into the driver’s seat.

Please man for god’s sake message me. I’m sorry about what happened. We can talk.

As soon as he’d got the phone back into its cradle, it lit to signal a notification, and Karl’s whole body jerked as if electric-shocked. But it was just Cruiz, some passenger using the messaging service, something dirty sent to the lover he was on his way to meet. Karl didn’t even glance at it.