‘You murdered her?’ she shrieks, piercing the spongy atmosphere, before chasing her voice with another slap.

‘Stop it! He didn’t murder Grace,’ Seb says, pulling her arm back.

‘The police don’t investigate people for murder without evidence.’

‘They do exactly that, Nina. He didn’t kill her.’ I hear the words but I am still consumed by this information. Why would Grace have been destroyed by me if she had left me, if she didn’t love me any longer?

‘She didn’t love me any more. That’s why she left,’ I say quietly to myself.

Nina swings her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Even you can’t believe that.’

‘I do believe that. That’s what she told me,’ I say, and as I do I feel my eyes stinging.

‘You want to know what she told me? She told me that you didn’t love her. That all you ever loved was a version of her that you had created. You didn’t love anything about the real her,’ Nina says.

‘How can you say that?’ I cry.

‘Because it’s true, Xander. You always thought you were better than her. Cleverer.’

‘I did not.’

‘You sneered at the things she loved. The yoga, the Buddhism, all of it. You even sneered at her taste in music.’

‘Her music?’

‘Yes, you hated her music. You made her feel worthless, Xander, at every turn.’

The words ring in my ears and now there is no room in my head for everything else I have been told in the last twenty-four hours.

I am aware of getting up and of following myself along the hall. Seb calls me back and then I am outside in the night. Wading through the air.

I walk hoping for a sliver of calm but for the longest time it doesn’t come. And then, at last, it begins. Every step rinses a drop of something from inside my head. Each stride cleanses, but only by fractions. I can’t walk quickly enough to stop the thoughts from multiplying, just for a second, so that I can get a proper handle on them. For some minutes I walk in a direction that I’ve walked before, and then I am at the Horniman grounds again. Something brings me back here time and again. It is as if the ghost of Grace is stronger here.

Once over the low wall I sit with my back against the other side of it. It is hallowed, the space here; I don’t need to go further. The wind collects in pockets and then blusters into my clothes, carrying off with it every bubble of warm air. I shiver. A shard of that memory pricks me whenever I am here.

A bench.

My hands in the soil.