‘It’s not a tort exactly, but the students like it. So – a man was accused of murdering his wife. She was found at the bottom of the staircase in a pool of blood. He had motive – they’d been arguing, and he stood to inherit a substantial sum from life insurance.

‘Anyway, there were wounds on her head. They thought the husband had struck her with a fire poker or some such. This was in the US, by the way —’

‘So they electrocuted him?’

Good, I thought, imagining the electricity lighting him up from the inside, those blue-white jolts finding their way.

‘Not quite. See, the wife had hanks of her own hair in each hand. And there were little feathers too. And the shape of the wounds wasn’t really consistent with a poker. Expert ornithologists said they looked like gashes caused by an owl’s talons. Also this was in the mating season, when owls are at their most aggressive.’

‘So… an owl did it?’

He shrugged, turning down his clown mouth in practised uncertainty. ‘The theory is that an owl attacked her in the garden, and she then stumbled inside and collapsed on the stairs. But what do you think? That’s what I ask my students. Who’s responsible? Who’s at fault? How many ways can you interpret the facts?’

Later I searched for information about owls. I learned that they did indeed swoop on humans, mistaking us for rats or mice. I learned that prey never saw or heard them coming, because their feathers were designed for silence: serrated on one edge, fringed on the other.

I learned that a half-kilogram owl could land on a mouse with the equivalent force of a ten-tonne truck.

After dinner, Marc rose to rinse the bowls and I followed.

He said, ‘I suppose I should look in on her,’ meaning the baby, and this is literally what he did. He leaned against the doorjamb, skinny arms folded across his chest, and looked.

‘Is she okay?’ I whispered.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘Well, goodnight I guess,’ I said. I went to my room.

I have had too many soft knocks on my door to be surprised by soft knocks. I was glad that he did not invent some kind of pretext to come in. I put my phone down and he went to the lit candle. I thought he would blow it out. Instead, he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. His belt buckle was level with my eyes.

My vision adjusted to the dark. Soon the light seemed white-blue in that room. I remember being surprised at how thick and impenetrable the bush of his pubic hair turned out to be. I remember tasting chicory on his breath.

Afterwards he stood and said, ‘Would you mind getting up?’

‘What?’

‘Could you just get up please?’

He switched the light on. He put on his trousers. I put an arm over my breasts.