The dining table is set for two. The room is lit by a religious profusion of candles, the wax-polished wood dark and brooding. Yet Jules can’t help noticing how like an operating table it is with its air of expectation and risk, its sharp, gleaming instruments laid out with precision. She would like to be nonchalant. But the more disordered her heart, the more ordered her surfaces. The more silence infests the gap between her and her husband, the more time stretches to make room for the snipping of flower stems, the ironing of napkins. The Venetian regulator wall-clock inherited from her uncle bongs eight, the vegetables sweat under foil, the meat bubbles quietly in its sauce, teetering on the brink of perfection, and Logan is absent. No call. No text.

Where is he, her husband? In the sinewy arms of the woman he refers to only as Salmon? (Not as one addressing a classmate or colleague, but as one attempting to hide the tenderness inherent in speaking her forename.) Being picked off a train track by vis-vested workers with plastic gloves, his identity not yet matched to the wallet in the glovebox of the car parked by the level crossing? Both thoughts make her shiver, but were she empowered to choose, by wish or by prayer, she’d plump for the second. Cleaner, no arguments. She, who has felt widowed in all but name for a year and a half, would be allowed to wear hair scraped back from an unmade face, no apologies. Would allow herself public tears: a quiet cry in the meat aisle, glistening eyes over a friend’s thoughtful risotto. And she would automatically keep the house; this house of old trees sawn true, this house of shelter and forgetfulness. More than keep it, she would own it, every joist and tie of it, every timber and cleat of it, every rafter and tile of it transferred to her sole name as a solace for widowhood. The son has no use for it; Logan has a policy for Tom. So it comes to her. She imagines receiving the knock: two officers at the door, one of them a woman; how she would take it calmly, spring tears, but feel relief.

She has waited a long time for her husband to return to her. Not minutes, but months. Never once did she imagine that when he resurfaced from his daughter’s grave, he would fall into another woman’s arms. Now she fears she has been tricked into holding on to a shadow. Like an illusionist’s assistant, she has played the game of gripping the thing that, time and again, changes shape, but she has been fooled. It will never turn back into the magician. Any moment, he will appear, to a gasp, at the back of the audience. All she will have in her hands is a flown dove; an empty cage.