April’s God is very real to her. She seeks His guidance and He is free with it. She issues Him instructions and He responds. They are pen pals. Every other page, Tell me through my left hand, and off He goes, spilling His incomprehensible guts as volubly as she spills hers on the pages in between. Logan feels a spike of jealousy. He longs for the comfort of being immersed in such a delusion. Is aware how pain might dissolve in the knowledge of an omniscient, omnipotent being who is both listening and responding, even if you have imagined that being into reality.

He will have a good chance, he thinks, of proving that this young woman’s religious convictions are a form of psychosis. He told Jules as much at breakfast, in answer to one of the questions she is routinely asking him these days, attempting to break into the Work cell where he is sheltering from his feelings.

You’ll be their champion, she said, jabbing a finger at the morning headline.

Surely not. People want the girl banged up for life. Properly punished. If she’s declared insane—

I think they’ll be rather happy about it. They’re calling for religious fundamentalism to be reclassified as a form of mental illness.

Who’s They? The media?

Everyone.

He sighed. Religious leaders?

Well, no. It doesn’t say—

Mental health organizations?

Don’t be pedantic, Finlay. You know what I mean.

You mean some people. You don’t mean everyone.

She buttered her toast as though she were combing out a child’s tangles.

There’s an editorial about it. The other papers are on it too. And politicians. There were questions in the House yesterday. You can see for yourself.

One unthinking hand launched the tablet into the channel of naked oak between them. It came to rest against the buoy of the marmalade pot.

He had been unable to read the news or listen to radio bulletins since Flora. He stayed clear of the television. There was always the danger that some story would leap out and barge him, bodily, against the wall of his emotions, smacking its knuckles into his skull. Yet hovering at a station kiosk for a bitter Americano, or failing to mute the kitchen radio at the top of the hour, he could still be ambushed. Four children have died in a house fire in Huddersfield – A toddler, battered to death by her stepfather – The police have confirmed that the body found in woods near Northampton is that of missing teenager – On public transport, his compulsion to read any text set in front of his eyes makes the free tabloids that commuters shake into his line of sight a menace. The unavoidable front page headline: Calls Grow to Recognize ‘God-Madness’ After Bus Girl Massacre. April’s was the third religiously inspired atrocity since Easter.

I don’t need to see, he said.