Clandestine coffees, museum picnics: she was hungry for his questions, the answers to which she could only discover as she reached them. Conversational spaces, which other men filled with themselves, he left open for her. Never trespassed, but waited until, at last, she stepped forward. Six months she called him from car parks and playgrounds: colouring herself in. Discerning at last who she was. Not daughter, girlfriend, partner, fiancée, but Jules.

The freedom she found in his love was intoxicating. But it dragged fear in its wake as a luxury yacht tows a dinghy. For how could he need her at all, this man who demanded so little? If she wasn’t required to complete him, would he not simply moor her to some shoreline post and vanish to a new adventure? She had challenged him to offer something permanent. He had given her the buttock rose. Which seemed generic, something he could offer any woman, until she noticed its petals spelt out her name.

Such a love cannot have evaporated into nothing. It is no more possible than that the Great Wall of China could prove itself a thousand-year-old illusion and vanish in a whiff of cordite.

But now he walls her off. She cannot access those spaces where she found herself. She plays conversational tennis against his surface, but the words bounce back. There is no opponent. No one to equal and call, All. No one to beat and call, Love. She is furious with Flora for dying.

We shared him, she tells the mirror, strangling the toothpaste tube into relinquishing yet another squeeze of itself. I was happy with that. Snatching the relegated kitchen sponge from its hiding place to polish to oblivion the fingerprint smear on her reflected face. But you had to go and die. Buffing the taps under their four brass chins like a furious barber. And now he’s bloody gone. Filling the sink with hatred and steam, drowning the flannel. Bloody gone. Wringing it out, burying her face in the heat of the cloth until the lump of uncried tears in her throat begins to ease.

And it’s bad enough she has to watch him pretending to eat breakfast in the kitchen, pretending to read in the study, pretending to lie by her side. But tonight she returns from cava-fuelled discussions of a novel about a serial adulterer to find her husband talking volubly to a red-haired, red-nailed woman at least a decade his junior and asking her, his wife, to make up the guest bed.

Could be worse, she says, nodding to reassure her reflection, running the movie where she finds them in the marital one. But her heart sags and splits. She has loaded herself up with too many sharp-cornered containers, carried herself too far, waited too long.