When I think about that, I feel the impact in my chest, the air pushed from my lungs, the clean sharp break of all the bones in my body. It hurts. It’s a violent equation, love plus loss. I don’t want that to be true. But I don’t know how else I’m supposed to put it.

Look how hard it hit me. I’m bleeding love story all over the place.

TWO

In the beginning, before I knew that I didn’t know much about anything, my mum and I moved into a house with a stranger in it. It was a big house in the small town she grew up in (and then left, by the way, swearing never to return) on a street where fat-knuckled trees pulled at the pavements with their roots, and the average age was well over fifty, and nobody said very much.

The stranger wasn’t hiding in the attic or lurking under the floorboards. He wasn’t a blind purchase. His name was Henry Lake, and he came with the sale, refusing to budge. A sitting tenant, Mum said. A fly in the freeholder’s ointment. A stick in the capitalist mud. “Something we can both get behind,” she said, which I told her was optimistic, and at the time, frankly, pushing it.

She remembered the street from her childhood, sort of, and that the houses were beautiful. And massive. And had yards that sloped right down to the sea. This meant less than nothing to me—five hours’ drive from my current definition of home—and I told her that too. But because of this stranger still living in it, this house on the sole of the boot of the country was a whole lot cheaper than anything else she’d managed to find. Thanks to Henry Lake being there, it was the one she could afford, so it was happening, we were going, end of discussion, and that was that. It’s thanks to him and because of him that so much other stuff happened too, and is still happening, but I’m getting ahead of myself, and when I started writing this down, that’s one of the things I swore I wouldn’t do. This particular love story is bewildering enough as it is without me helping.

We didn’t have a separate front door or anything. Henry Lake’s rooms were on the middle floor, and we were just meant to move in and live around him like the white surrounds the yolk of an egg. I said that was flat-out ridiculous, and when Mum told me to get used to it, every cell in my body screamed never.