The cold makes me huddle into myself and then from nowhere, the side of her face blooms into view, framed by dark mahogany curls. I couldn’t save her. I correct myself: I could have saved her but I didn’t. And now I can’t even find her. How many people might be looking for her? How long could she go before being missed? That website that Amit happened upon, documenting the thousands of people who go missing, showed me that most people go missing quietly. A person or two notices. The police don’t have time to devote much effort to them. And then, months later, they are found – dead in a field, by a road. Just dead. Is this what will happen to her? Will she die without a body or a funeral?

I can’t let that be what happens.

At Rory’s funeral there was nobody from home. Everybody, except me and Grace, was from his new life – work colleagues, mainly. A few friends from Cambridge who went on, like him, to live and work in London. All these young men and women stood at the graveside, their faces in ruin but their clothes immaculate. Funeral chic. The women cried, the men nodded quietly. Afterwards a few came to pay their respects, and offered me their hands to shake.

‘They didn’t know him,’ I said to Grace.

‘But they loved him anyway,’ she replied. She looked into the sky as it began to spit. I looked at her and saw that she was like them. Her face was blanched with grief but her dress was new and looked fashionable. Her golden hair, frivolous against the funeral blacks.

‘Thanks for coming,’ I said to her. ‘Even though we’re not—’

She held my arm in both hands. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I loved him. And you too.’ She gazed into the sky as if searching for a speck of light in the steel clouds.

‘Just not enough,’ I said and she released my arm.

‘Xander. Not here. Please.’ Her face pleaded with me.

‘I’m sorry about your loss.’ I looked up to see a young woman with a short black bob, her fringe brushing her eyes. ‘I’m Taz. I worked with Rory.’

Nodding away her condolences, I waited for her to leave. But she lingered.

‘I – um. How did it happen? He seemed such a calm person,’ she said then, pulling her scarf closer to her body against the weather.

I looked at her hard. ‘I killed him,’ I said. My mouth filled with something metallic from the air. I’d had a lifetime to absorb, reconstitute, reinvent whatever had happened to me. The pain had turned my cells inside out, but I’d adapted over time. Rory, though, was too old when he found out, too brittle, for the onslaught of pain. And above all, I’d known it.