I sat down and waited for him to look up. I wanted to tell him everything, but not like this, when he was distracted by other things. A minute later he got up to stir the sauce and then stopped dead in his tracks before crossing over to me.

‘Lay. What is it?’

‘I was almost killed today,’ I said.

He stood me up gently and turned me to him. ‘What?’

‘On Waterloo Bridge. A car came off the road. Missed me by that much,’ I said, showing him an inch of space between my fingers.

‘Shit, Lay,’ he said, looking me up and down. ‘Are you okay?’

Was I okay? When I started to think about it, tears streamed. He blurred in front of me until he held me. I hid under the scent of cologne and olive oil and pepper, like a child under a blanket.

Later that night when I lay in bed, the man’s face from earlier appeared in my peripheral vision, his eyes lion-like, fractured.

‘Are you okay?’ Russell asked for the second time that day. He leaned over so that he could see my face.

I looked across and ventured a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ I replied.

He touched my hand with the back of his and sunk into his pillow. ‘If anything had happened to you,’ he said and left the rest unspoken but heavy in the air.

The chaos of the accident played out on the ceiling as I stared at it. The blood – how dark it was on the tarmac, like hot oil. The screams running in a loop in my head, spooling out a jagged reproduction. Now there was the man himself, his face hovering at the soft edges. I held on to him long enough to see the detail. Did I know him? He seemed to know me. His face was familiar – not known exactly but similar, to someone I had there in my memory. I’d seen him somewhere before.

Sleep came in patches and in the morning, after a ragged night, I woke to find Russell had gone. He’d left everything neat and tidy in the bedroom and the kitchen, his cereal bowl washed and drained. I knew he was being considerate but sometimes he gave the impression of a man who didn’t want to be seen.

I washed and dressed in a hurry and made my way into the office on the Strand. Alice was humming away across the room and smiled when I waved. My head was too crowded to speak to her, so I buried myself under the cover of a file to give myself time to arrange my thoughts.