An older couple walks next to Amy, arm in arm, their faces ashen. With a flash of pain, Freya recognises Jonathan in their features. His father is an older version, the same eyes, the same curly hair, his now thinning and grey. Her throat tightens as she thinks about what Jon would have looked like as he grew older. Not now, she tells herself, clenching her hands into fists and looking up at the roof of the church. Don’t cry now.

A hush falls across the crowd. The vicar walks up to the front and talks about God, then reads a passage from the Bible. Jon wouldn’t have given a shit about this, Freya thinks. He was apathetic about religion, agnostic at best. He wouldn’t want to be remembered in this church.

Freya feels a curious detachment from the proceedings. She knew Jon better than many of the people here, yet she’s right at the back, and nobody has the faintest idea who she is.

Kal stands up, walking to the front and clearing his throat. He starts to talk, slowly at first, telling a story about their university days. How they met, a drunken brawl, Jonathan trying to break up the fight and getting punched in the process, nearly arrested by the police. Kal calls him Jonny, almost too casual for the persona that Freya knew. People laugh at the story, but it’s restrained. A noise made because they think they should, rather than an expression of real humour. What story would Freya tell, given the opportunity? What would she say?

Maybe she’d tell them about the time he broke into her house. A crash from the living room, in the middle of the night, her hand hovering over her phone. And then a recognisable voice: ‘Oh, shit.’

She went downstairs and switched the light on, to find Jon blinking in the middle of the room.

‘I broke your lamp,’ he said apologetically, looking at the pieces in his hand. ‘Your window was open,’ he added, as if that was a valid excuse.

He looked so comical, so completely unthreatening and unlike any burglar she’d ever seen, that she couldn’t help but laugh.

‘I nearly called the police,’ she replied. ‘Why aren’t you at the conference?’

‘You are the police! And we finished a day early. I couldn’t wait to see you. I…’

‘What? You stupid man!’

‘I love you.’ He looked at the floor as he said it, bashful. ‘I just wanted to tell you that.’

She was so caught off guard, standing in front of him in her pyjamas, that all she could do was utter, ‘And you couldn’t have rung the doorbell?’