He is handling the headscarves, not because Jules would ever wear a headscarf, but because they remind him of his mother. He is wondering, if she were alive and he knew where she was, which one he would buy her. Then he is looking at fountain pens. How do these places survive? Who buys fountain pens? Who even writes any more? Flora was punished once, he remembers, for submitting a piece of school homework handwritten. She had made a toy theatre, decorated it beautifully, and accompanied it with boiled-down scripts, carefully inked in a cursive hand. He had thought it all utterly charming. Indeed, had imagined it would garner extra points for handcrafted beauty. But schools had moved on. She was told it was wrong, was marked down for not word-processing and printing out the scripts. Came home crying, the first casualty of his Ludditery. His insistence she learn the principles first, word before Word, pen before PenTaGram, cost her a grade.

He is just about to wander into the dining-ware section when something brings him to a standstill. Devotion. Flora’s scent. Memory is triggered so strongly that his first instinct is to whirl round, genuinely expectant that he will find her grinning behind him, perhaps wielding a fountain pen in gentle mockery. But there is no one behind him. Truly no one; not one human neck that might sport such a scent.

Logan’s first fear is that he is, again, going mad. One thought of Flora and he smelt her. Is she about to appear? The Anesthine is out of his system. Are the hallucinations back? He plumbs his surroundings for symptoms of reality melting, but everything is still and sharp-edged, contained in its cabinets and boxes. There must be a rational explanation. His heart is thumping. The smell is already fading. Where is it coming from?

The answer lies just around the corner and three steps down: a perfume department. Two girls, just released from the local High School, are spraying testers on each other’s wrists. Two retail assistants in white blouses and neck-scarves are staring at them disapprovingly. These are not the kind of girls, they have judged, that can afford to buy Devotion. If Devotion it is. The bottle they currently have in their hands is Jules’s favourite, Eau de Tristesse. But presumably they are working their way along the counter; one scent on the left wrist, one scent on the right, two more under left and right ears as they smell each other and giggle.

There is always a rational explanation. He stands for a moment at the top of the three steps leading into the perfume department, holding on to the handrail, letting the feelings run through him. Relief. Disappointment. But how could he think otherwise? Dead is dead. At least the girls have given him an idea.