‘I’m so sorry. I’m so … I’m drunk,’ he says, and then he gathers up his belongings. As he does he knocks over a glass which shatters on the hard surface of the coffee table.

‘Oh, shit,’ he says, and begins to collect up the shards. ‘Oh, shit,’ he says again, his finger is in his mouth and he hops around trying, drunkenly, to clear up the room. At the other end of the room, Grace is breathing heavily but has returned to herself.

He straightens up from where he has been rooting around on the floor. I can see from the sofa that he has gathered up the broken record pieces. He proffers them, pathetically, to her.

‘Just leave!’ she says.

He drops the pieces softly by the window, and then he is gone.

And now I am on my feet. Her sobbing has brought me out and I think, ridiculously, that I can comfort her. That she wants me. I pad softly to where she is standing by the dining table. She is crying softly into her hands. I put my arm around her and she bristles suddenly.

‘You nearly killed me, you. You fucking, you fucking weak, pathetic,’ she says. The words have struck me before I have registered what they mean. Before I have understood that they are meant for him and not me. She will think that I’m him, until she can see me. But she can’t see me, it is too dark. It is too much of a stretch for her mind to make sense of me, here. When she realises it’s not him but someone else, she screams out in terror. She lashes out frantically, in fear, slapping at my face. As soon as the blows land – almost before the sound waves reach my ears – I react. As if bound by the laws of physics. Every force. An equal and opposite reaction. As soon as her hand whips my skin, my instinct for survival pushes mine back at her. It happens before I can stop it. It is that quick.

Her head snaps back on her neck with a crack. She freezes then as if between decisions. Her face is a pale, perfectly still surprise. My heart stops. In that gap. When all things still remain possible. My life, then, flashes before me in a kaleidoscope. Bright-light moments. Heavy sadnesses. Regrets, all of them. Mistakes. My mind gathers as many as it can in that divided infinite sub-second, as if fleeing from a burning building with my last possessions.

Then her knees buckle, as if the bones in her legs have vaporised. As she drops, another dull crack. Her body pulls the back of her head down hard on the edge of the table. And then, a final thud, and she lies scattered on the floor.

I remember dropping to my knees and whispering her name over and over.