At first, she was sure he was back. He was calm and rational. He was ordered and detached. My Finlay, she thought, my Finlay is back in himself. No more Brian. But it only took a few days to understand: not all of him. Something of him was missing, and what was wandering around in her kitchen was more like the inadequate clone of a husband you would find in a sci-fi horror movie: same body, same memories, but something indefinably wrong. Anesthine obligingly obliterated grief, but the whole of him, all of his fire, was dampened down. Like a twentieth-century cancer drug that made no distinction between diseased cells and healthy ones, Anesthine could not tell bereavement from love; perhaps because bereavement is love, or the end result of it. Jules thought of her brother in the final fortnight of his life, struggling to get up the stairs by himself; skeletal not through the cancer itself but the drugs meant to kill it. And that was her marriage: weakened, poisoned and bald. Who knew how long she could keep looking at it?

Nevertheless, it limped the six weeks from New Year to Valentine’s Day. They agreed it was too much bother to go out, so they had food delivered, exchanged cards like legal contracts, and sat opposite each other, swapping reassuring smiles through the wax bars of a triple candelabrum. Jules had laid the table with her usual care, but with a Valentine’s theme, stooking red napkins with small bows of pink ribbon, and scattering crêpe paper hearts around their plates. But the symbolism of the day was immaterial. Finlay stripped the napkin of its ribbon as though he were filleting a fish, and spoke mostly about his caseload, salting this unappetizing plateful of psychopaths with new train diversions due to engineering works. The heart-shaped pink-foiled chocolates she’d arranged by his serving of cheesecake could have been any shape at all – Christian crosses, Satanic pentagrams, bloody parallelograms, he wouldn’t have noticed. What’s to notice? Peel, chew, swallow. It was pointless. Pointless. She cursed herself. She should have known that love cannot be fabricated with any amount of ribbon and crêpe paper. Jules went to bed early and numb. Finlay stayed up – do you mind? – to watch a film about a miscarriage of justice.