• Rachel’s forgetfulness. If that’s what it was. Too busy chanting and meditating on life to prevent its creation by orderly contraception.
• Rachel’s insecurity. The urge to own him, even as she felt him slipping away, unconsciously erasing Take pill from her mental To Dos.

But in his heart he knew it was his fault. How in wanting to make things better, he always managed to make things worse. There she’d stood, crying, and what could he do but hold her, stroke her hair? Not considering she would respond with strokes of her own. And how could he quash that response without being unkind, without shoving her bodily off love’s kerb and back into tears? A chain of affection, like a series of small explosions, detonated desire; the passion stoked by the finding of something lost. Then they are stripping, kissing, fingers fumbling on catches and zips, and she has never been more ferocious, and before he knows it he is inside her again, thinking, One last time, then, one last time. Which she took as resolution. Which she took as retraction. What a mess. You, Finlay Logan, are an idiot.

But then his daughter arrived. And since he was banned from Rachel’s home until the bloody water of the birthing pool had been sluiced away, the placenta buried beneath a patio rose, he experienced his daughter not as a mess, but as a miracle.

Flora. Extraordinary, wonderful, Flora. He only has to think her name and he is lost.

Tickets?

He finds his phone without thinking. Inside pocket. Waved at the sensor; returned. He can do so much without thinking now. Has ordered and automated his life to float over this endless carpet of grief without putting its feet down. Yet there are moments that knock him against it, when he feels the sting of letting existence rattle on despite this ever-present absence, sharp as a friction burn. Today, across the carriage, a three-year-old, full of her me-ness, clambers into the preoccupied lap of her father, who, irritated, lumps her off again.

Do you not know how blessed you are? Do you not know—

The thought is caustic; he switches his gaze to the periscoping countryside. His eyes skip along power lines, blur the palisades of fences, trees, trees, trees – breathe. But he has touched it. The effervescent green of the trees is an assault.

Train journeys leave the mind rattling loose in its cage. But driving spooks him. Autonomous cars slink into your slipstream and maintain their perfect metre: too close, to his old-fashioned mind. And the way they lock on to you, mirror your every twitch: he finds himself fighting paranoia. On longer routes, great numbers will link up behind him, until he feels like he’s driving a train. He doesn’t want to drive a train. He wants to be alone.

No one sees the quiet tear from the eye closest to the window.