Logan was chained to these memories as a human sacrifice is chained, waiting for the dragon to devour him. Time flowed on around him, without him: he remained with the boulder. The lives of others moved on; the sense that his had stopped was palpable. It is a commonplace that time slows for a kettle’s boil, worm-crawls during an anxious wait, creeps snail-like towards an execution. But when a parent loses a child, time simply breaks. Severed the moment he learned of Flora’s death, his thread of time had separated from the world’s. His wife, his friends, his colleagues, continued to be dragged forward into a future he could not envisage. Logan was left where he was, experiencing time only as an eddy created by other people’s wakes. Clocks continued in their business without him. The moon orbited and the earth spun, and Logan stayed exactly in the second he learned of his daughter’s death.

He told Jules none of this. He had no way of describing it. And as the days passed, with her in them and him outside of them, their separation grew. But Jules was a qualified social worker. She had been awarded a distinction for her dissertation on grief. And she discerned in him a growing morbidity.

So, though he barely registered the process, she attained his careless assent to a series of questions. As devoid as he was of any appetite for living, the easiest route through any day was to murmur Yes; she left him alone sooner, he discovered, than if he said I don’t know. Legally speaking, he now recognized, he was not of sound mind. The only consequence he had desired was for Jules to stop asking him things. But from his initial assent, the questions just became more numerous and trivial. Was this house better than that house? Was this conservatory too ugly? What about the Brockenhurst house? Was he bothered by the absence of a mains gas supply?

How could any of this matter when Flora, beautiful, astonishing, Flora—

An absence, a whooshing of air. Restraining straps loose, flapping in a violent draught. The cargo doors open. Whatever was here has just gone.

Whatever you think, he said. Don’t ask me any more.