Later, escaping, he slept awhile in his hotel room. He woke feeling groggy. After splashing his face with water, he went down to the lobby and sat in a tall-backed chair, tipping his head forward and fiddling with his phone. He waited until he saw Nikolai go out, then took the lift for the new wing and his employers’ suite. When Darya opened the door, she told him to leave.

‘I have to talk to you.’

‘Shhh.’ She tilted her head at the doors behind her, closed on the alcove where Anton was sleeping. She reluctantly let him in, asking, ‘What is it?’

Speaking in a low urgent tone, he tried to tell her what he’d realised the day before at the river, about the strength of the current and his own powerful feelings. Yet instead of listening, really listening, she moved to the window and looked down at the river. Outside, the sky had turned a deep Byzantine purple. On the street below, people were gathering by a church, waiting for the priest to come out and speak.

It was true, Darya said slowly – and here he knew she had missed the point – the river flowed strongly out towards the gulf. ‘You know, one night last year a man drove off the bridge when it was raised. His car washed so far down that it was days before the divers found it on the bottom.’

Why was she telling him this? He went to her and tried to put his arms around her but she said, ‘Go. I need you to go.’

He did as she said, going out to the corridor and around a corner, where he stood for a moment with his back against the wall. Then he heard her ask, ‘Are you there?’ Her voice was quiet, lonely – the loneliest words he had ever heard, coming though they did from someone who had no reason to be lonely, who was going to be a mother. ‘Are you there?’ she asked again, more insistently this time. Paul straightened and went back, full of an unreasoning hope.

They made love quietly so as not to wake Anton. This was the end of things, he knew, but everything felt heightened. Whatever his previous doubts about her feelings, he did not have them in her presence. Here, in the hotel room, he believed that she loved him, even though later it would seem impossible again and he would start to believe she’d never felt anything for him.

Afterwards, he looked at her body before she could disguise it, glimpsing before she turned away the curve of her belly, the noticeable tilt above the pubic patch.

‘You can’t be here,’ she said.

He left a second time. In his room he took out his phone and googled ‘sex with pregnant woman harm to unborn baby?’ Then he scrolled through the results, sagging with relief.