He doesn’t respond. Taking a deep breath, she circles round the sofa and hovers awkwardly a few feet from him. Better that, she thinks, than stand over him like a parent, or a priest. His face is hidden under the crook of his arm.

You okay?

A sharp expulsion of air through his nose, almost like a laugh, but no words.

I’m really sorry, she says. She is frightened he will be angry with her. Will say something hurtful. It feels like a huge risk even to be in his presence. She is doing this because somehow, despite everything that has gone wrong between them, and despite the fact that she has – three times now – had oral sex with Donal, she does care about her husband. She is still a good wife, she tells herself, and it is not just place settings and bedspread-folding.

Please go away, Jules, her husband says, his voice muffled.

A tightness rises in her throat. Whatever she cannot say, its containment is painful, though in truth she doesn’t have words for it, and might have to speak many barely coherent sentences before finding out what it is. But he has said go away, which also means don’t speak, and now she will never find out what words were compressed to form the lump in her throat.

His wife has not gone away. He can sense her still in front of him. Still under the shield of his arm, he opens one eye and can see her knees. Ordinary knees in black slacks. His head is getting hot. He would like to emerge from under his arm. But he doesn’t want her to see him like this: red-eyed, vulnerable. That is not how they have been together. It could change – everything.

I don’t mean to be rude, he says, still under his arm. I just need to be alone for a bit.

For a bit? The voice comes back quiet and tremulous.

Maybe a few days. Until the drug is out of my system. ‘The drug’ she will understand. But the drug is already out of his system. What he needs to get out of his system is grief. And how to get it out of him when it feels endless? Like the dark opposite of the little Dutch boy in the story from his childhood, he has pulled his finger out of the crack in the dyke and now a relentless flow of grief is running through him. This respite is only exhaustion. He knows when he has slept and woken, he will weep again.

He feels Jules shuffling in front of him. She is searching for something more to say. But at last the hum of her anxiety moves away, and after a defeated click he knows she is on the other side of the door.