Later, much later, Dan sits up and looks around. Atticus is still there. Still dead. Dan sees that the chandelier has been taken apart, each glass tear wrapped neatly in tissue paper. He thinks of the hours it must have taken Atticus to preserve it so carefully, before he used the hook to end his life. There is an envelope hanging from one of the tears with his name on it.

Daniel. I couldn’t go on any longer. I chose to stop. Don’t do the same. You are going to change the world.

There are phone calls to make and things to do, but Dan is undone. He manages one text to Luke. Atticus’s postcode with shaking hands. LUKE. I NEED YOU. BRING FITZ.

When he can bring himself to move, he carefully slips the loafers from his lover’s feet and stands cradling them like newborn babies in his arms.

Lizzie

(I want my mum)

BETH SLEEPS ON THE train. The drugs the doctor has given her make her tired. She has been diagnosed with postnatal depression, which is complicated by her autism. There is a letter tucked into her bag. She isn’t surprised. Knew it, deep down, but it’s so much easier to swim with the tide instead of against it.

The doctor had undressed her with his probing questions. She was naked before he made her lie on a paper-covered bed under a spotlight so he could peer at her cuts and burns. Catalogue them. The last time she’d lain on a bed like this, she’d given birth to a dead baby with a head of dark hair. A baby who’d been healthy enough, at some point, to grow ten perfect fingers and toes, all the phases of the moon. The midwife had pressed them into soft white clay to take an imprint.

The last time she’d been touched was by Luke, in reverence. This was nothing like that. Beth was swiped and dabbed at with ointments and words that stung.

‘You can’t cut your thighs any more. They won’t heal.’

‘You’re lucky this one didn’t get infected.’

‘This should have had a skin graft.’

‘How have you even been able to walk with all these on your feet?’

The man’s detached coldness made Beth think maybe she’d make a good doctor after all. She’d never speak to someone like this, though. She might lack small-talk, but she would never be as removed as he was. The human body, the whole world, is too full of wonders for her ever to feel neutral.

Villages and fields blur past her window. Her eyes can’t take it all in. She has to close them, find Lenny’s face behind her eyelids, let the weight of him keep her in her seat, on the train, moving forwards.