It was a place where I once took him blackberrying. He hated it there, with the waves so fierce the spray reached us six metres up. He’d covered his face, but I turned mine to the water and lifted it to the sky in exhilaration while Zac said I was mad, half-jokingly, but also half in pride. The cliff jutted out over a section of the ocean where fishing boats had been lost, the currents ensuring that those who drowned there were never found.

Every step Zac took along the path to that cliff would be in dread, knowing what he was likely to find. He would stumble upon my phone and clothes and shoes, beneath a tree that was bent by the fierce wind that had blasted it for a century. At the very edge, he would find the memory box, with the teddy bear still inside, left for him, but the photograph and footprint gone. He would think that I had taken them with me, into the sea, going where he could not follow.

Now
Thorpe Hall

Yorkshire, Tuesday, 9 April 2019

It is 7 p.m. and I have been off the motorway for fifteen minutes when my mobile begins to ring. George’s name is flashing on the display, which is set up for hands-free and clamped into a cheap plastic holder that clips into an air vent. I press accept, hit the speaker-phone button, and say hello.

‘I thought you were going home,’ he says.

‘How do you know I’m not?’ Windmills are rising above a valley that is lined with dark brick houses.

‘Lucky guess.’ There is the tap of fingers on a keyboard. ‘I discovered something you might find interesting.’

‘What?’ I am leaving the rows of houses behind. To my left is a small lake, which channels itself into tiny streams, criss-crossing through fields of deep green.

‘Eliza was working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was there from January 2012 until March 2017, flying back and forth between the US and Europe as part of the job.’

Zac said in that London hotel that Eliza had been in the US for a few years, and I’d found something along those lines a few days ago, when I did an Internet search on her.

‘Here’s the thing,’ he says. ‘I found some medical records for her in the US.’

‘What kind of records?’ The fields are dotted with new lambs, chasing their mothers. I am not sure why, but I am holding my breath for his answer.

‘She was seeing a reproductive endocrinologist soon after she arrived there. She was only thirty-two, but the diagnosis was premature ovarian failure.’

The scenery outside my car window seems to mock what George is talking about. It takes me a few seconds to form the words. ‘Eliza was already in full menopause?’

‘Not my area of expertise, but as far as I can understand it, yes.’