‘We tried to find you, Xand, but you’d gone. Nobody knew where you were. After Rory went, you just, I don’t know, you weren’t right. We could see it. But nobody knew that you’d fall so quickly. It felt like you had vaporised. We didn’t see you for a year. And then one day you just turned up. Here. Looking for your stuff. You needed money.’

Dollars? Did I take the dollars, I think, my heart sinking. I can’t remember turning up. ‘And?’ I say.

‘I gave you some money and you left. You really don’t remember?’ he says, cocking his head.

I shake my head. Some of this feels like a memory I had once but whatever strands there were have long since gone.

‘Did you really tell me about Grace? I can’t believe I would have forgotten that.’

‘Yes, well, we tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t hear it. No matter what I said, it didn’t seem to sink in. You just nodded and left. You took a bag of books with you and went.’

His words are beginning to rekindle memories. I remember the books – I think I remember. Two carrier bags filled with books I had left here. I remember the red creases that the handles ripped into my palms. I remember walking the streets with those bags until one morning I woke to find they had gone. The memory is a haze in that the feeling around it is stronger than the seeing of it. I remember a sadness with it, like a stone flung into a pool.

‘Didn’t the police want to talk to me?’

‘The police? No. Why would they?’ He pauses, assembling what I told him last night. ‘No. They didn’t suspect foul play at the time. They investigated, said it was an accident. She’d banged her head on a table and had a drunken fall. Just bad luck, they said.’

‘So, they weren’t treating it as a murder? Not ever?’

‘No. Not as far as I knew.’

‘And then?’

‘Well. There was the service. We expected you, of course, but weren’t shocked when you didn’t show. And then, slowly, we just got on with life. Well, we tried. Nina took it badly.’

I let the news seep through my skin and into my bones. Funeral.

‘There was a funeral,’ I said. More statement than question.

‘Yes. Well, cremation. Nina scattered the ashes.’

I remember now Conway saying this about a cremation. I drop my face into my hands. There is so much of my life that has scattered through my fingers. I am disgusted by my hands suddenly in this clean space and I get to my feet.

‘I need a bath,’ I say, and then hover for a second because I know saying it like that must seem like a non sequitur to Seb but he just nods.