He laughs. She doesn’t. The car is gone, and in the silent gap it leaves the river churns faintly. He’d never thought of wanting a sofa.

‘Why?’

‘My mum wanted one.’

‘Why?’

‘She had these magazines.’

He can hear her mouth. She speaks quietly, and in the night, in the dark, the words are formed against her teeth and her lips. He can hear the touch of them.

‘She put pictures of everything she wanted on the wall.’

‘But why a sofa?’

‘We didn’t have one.’

‘Why not a house?’

‘A house too.’

‘Where?’

‘Anywhere. Not here.’

Dillon waits.

‘The country,’ says Rose. She says this like it’s a specific place, far away. ‘A house in the country. We had a picture.’

They listen to the wind. It blows through the cracks between the boarded windows and their empty frames with a reedy whistle.

‘Do you see her?’ he asks.

He can feel her silence on his skin, the catch and shift of her breath as she doesn’t speak.

‘Mine’s dead,’ he says.

‘You told me,’ she says.

He can’t remember. It seems impossible.

Another car passes. The light slides down the wall. It catches her foot, slim and strange, a disembodied fragment of a person, lying in the debris of the house. Then it’s gone.

He wants to stay here, in the dark, in the silence.

‘She’s in London,’ Rose says, eventually.

This is a lie, Dillon knows. It sits between them, delicate and sad.

Paula walks down her hall, opens the glass inner door, steps onto the carefully restored Victorian tiles, opens the wooden front door. She’s changed out of the narrow, tailored skirt suit she wears at school, but her skinny jeans are somehow no less severe.

She greets her sister-in-law, Titch. Titch is a tall woman with a full face. She had been pretty, but her features have thickened with age. In the mornings she looks herself up and down and knows that in the wrong light she is now almost ugly, but she has the right powder and the right lipstick, and just enough mascara to pull it back.

They talk at the dining-room table over wine. They smile at each other, the kind, careful smiles of people practised at smiling, and at the compromises that those smiles are designed to make. They are friends, but friends through circumstance, not choice. It creeps up on you, thinks Titch, and then you realise you’ve known someone for twenty years.

‘I do like your house,’ she says. ‘You and Andy have such great taste.’ Her fingers end in bright acrylic nails that skate delicately over the surface of the table, tapping once or twice. ‘I love this table,’ she adds.

They sip their wine. The light outside the window dims towards evening.

‘I’m a little nervous about tomorrow,’ says Titch.

‘They’re only kids.’

‘It’s easy for you to say that,’ says Titch.