Jules has never heard her husband cry. On that Saturday when the police arrived – is there anything more ominous than opening the door to that strong/sympathetic pairing, policeman and policewoman? – he had made no sound at all. Listening to those dreadful yet ordinary words, the sorry that made nothing better, the lies undoubtedly invented for his ears (‘died instantly and would have felt no pain’ – how could anyone know?), he had sat very still and silent. It was she who was the source of the terrible noise that began to fill the room, a noise she didn’t at first even recognize as her own. It was she who had sobbed and caused the policewoman’s arm to snake around her shoulders in consolation. Finlay had remained silent, though in response to her noise he had begun to shake like a naked man in the snow. Since then, a handful of times, she had seen him tear up and leave the room, but she had never heard him cry. If he cried elsewhere, he was silent, as his childhood had taught him to be. Because what father wants to hear a son wailing the loss of the woman he himself drove out of the house, the woman he also wants to wail for?

So when the noise first rises out of an upstairs room, Jules freezes. It is a terrible animal noise, inconsolable and bottomless, the kind of noise that might crack a wall, fell birds from the sky. It is a dark drowning noise, an anguished and muscular noise, a toddler’s despair expressed with a grown man’s lungs.

Her first instinct is to leave the house. If she goes out she can pretend she hasn’t heard it; there is no obligation to go to him. But even as she collects her coat from the hall closet like a thief, and holds down the handle of the back door to close it without the latch clicking, she realizes she cannot start the car, or even open the garage door to retrieve her bicycle, without him hearing. Hoping the noise in his head will at least drown out her feet on the gravel tramping away from him, she lets Achilles lead her into the forest. When she returns, the house is silent. She tiptoes upstairs in her walking socks and cocks her head to one side, the better to strain for some auditory proof of his existence. There: a sudden collection of ragged in-breaths, the aftermath familiar from her own memories of childhood sobbing bouts.

With her fingertips, she pushes the door open, letting it venture into the space ahead of her, while she keeps her feet planted on the landing carpet. She can just see the top of his head, a muss of hair on the arm of the sofa.

Finlay? she enquires.