I’m just working out where we are so we can find our way back, he explains. GPS co-ordinates for what?

For God.

That’s your explanation?

It’s just a label for everything we don’t understand. Traditionally God is omnipresent. Is everywhere. I say God is consciousness. And Logan? She fixes her eyes on him until he looks up. I know where we are.

‌Gone

Jules has laid the table for breakfast and vanished. There is a fresh granary loaf on the bread board, and a bag of croissants from the village bakery. Beside the kettle the spherical chrome teapot, whose insides are heaped with the correct quantity of loose leaf Twinings Assam, gapes like a patient at the dentist’s. Gathered in the centre of the kitchen’s reclaimed oak table, a cluster of home-made jams bought at the Women’s Institute Fayre, complete with their rubber-banded paper mob caps. Flanking the jams at perfect ninety-degree angles: two black slate place mats, which slide-rule precision has arranged with two square white side plates, two best-set knives, and the cup and saucer pair he brought home from Paris one long-ago Valentine’s. His wife’s more prosaic breakfast crockery is dripping itself dry on the draining board, and the car is missing.

Logan feels a pang at the orderliness of it all. Will you make up the guest bed? was all he said. And Of course was all she replied; no emotion in her face, no drama. It was he who was afraid.

Gabrielle had been tired and ready to leave. The crunch of tyres in the drive provoked his guest to notice the time; the first words of excusal from her lips and his stomach began worming: What if? What if? No other words, and he buried the worm under good manners, but as she reached for her coat from the hall banister and yawned, the sentence completed. What if she fell asleep at the wheel? What if she – this person who could speak to his daughter – wrapped her car round a tree? She’d be lost to him. It happens. These things happen. He had taken the grape Afghan from her, as if he was about to help her into it, but saw a rash of blue lights, pneumatic cutting equipment, Gabrielle’s white, uninhabited face. He folded the coat over his arm.

Please stay, he said. It’s too late for driving. Tomorrow is Saturday. You can stay in the guest room.

At which point, a key turned in a lock and Jules walked in, a book under her arm, wine on her breath. Saw him, saw Gabrielle.

This is Dr Salmon, he said.

Just arrived?

Just leaving, said Gabrielle.

And words fell from his mouth: No, please— too quick. Too desperate. A veil fell over his wife’s gaze, as though she had kicked herself into neutral. In response, Logan found a more rational gear.