It was harder to bury Grace than to bury Rory. The physical interment was one thing. Rory went into the ground with all the rituals of goodbye. The rites signal that it’s time to move away, to move on. When that lid closes, when the box is lowered, when the earth is scattered and the words are said, when the belongings are tidied away, the message is inscribed: move away now. There is nothing left. These goodbyes have been extended too long already.

I breathe in deep draughts.

Grace was different. She didn’t stay in one place to be put under soil. She kept living in my head, in a hundred different incarnations. There were no rituals. One day we were there spinning in one another’s orbits, like twinned planets, the next she had moved out. Ma belle. Gone. And with her everything that she had accumulated, then later absorbed into our lives, was gone too. The debris she left was minimal: a hairclip in the bathroom, a forgotten mug with a work logo on one side, that pendant, some possessions of equivocal ownership like records and books. But there had been no rituals so she, though alive, was harder to mourn.

I’ve held on to the memory of the last time I saw her and how I looked up when I saw the shoes.

‘Xander,’ she said, and crouched down on to the pavement to speak to me as if I were a child. She was dressed for work, her hair like pale honey, shining in places. Newly cut. Newly bright. Her perfume was light, like breath on my face. The shell nestled in a dip in her chest.

The shame I felt when I saw her looking at my hands comes back now.

‘Come on,’ she said, and stood. ‘There’s a café over there. Let’s have some breakfast.’

Though I hesitated, the need to be with her was too strong.

‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘They won’t have me. There’s a place around the corner.’

I’d known the owner of the café before I took to the streets. He was Iraqi and had been a physicist before he had sought asylum in the UK. ‘Saddam’s bombs. I make them work not so well. So of course, he want to kill me now,’ he’d said. ‘And family.’

‘Mr Xander,’ he said as I walked in. ‘Same as usual for you?’ He stopped then and looked at Grace. Pristine.

‘Please,’ he said, taking a tea towel and wiping down a table in the window. ‘Please to sit.’

Grace smiled and we sat at a Formica table.

‘Very intelligent man. Very intelligent,’ he said pointedly to her about me before withdrawing.