Lydia’s intelligence was cool and unsentimental, she saw her situation clearly, and knew it was possible that she’d lost everything. She had lived with fatal passivity, she thought, relinquishing her own control over what path she took – this had begun perhaps when she married Zachary, or perhaps long before that. Such cowardice anyway didn’t bring good luck. And what would remain of her, if she were left all alone? She might have amounted only to what the others made of her. Bowed under her own judgement – she had spoiled something, and couldn’t be forgiven – she imagined Christine at work in her studio, self-sufficient and fulfilled. Lydia had left behind on her friend’s wall the painting of her best self, could never have it back. Now the short autumn days of lazy warmth and waiting seemed measured by the ebb and flow of visitors in the gallery next door; at a certain time, when the gallery closed, she was aware of chill emptiness on the far side of the wall. And each night she slept alone underneath the terrible quilt the others had sewn, with its scarlet zed; sometimes in the small hours she woke from nightmares and was afraid to fall asleep again.

She wanted Zachary then, who used to comfort her. Someone had packed away all his belongings which had been beside the bed when he died, into the drawer of the bedside table; when Grace and Alex cleared his things out of the house they hadn’t thought to check inside this drawer. Alex hadn’t disturbed its contents since, although he’d been sleeping on that side of the bed and must have looked in there. Lydia took out the items one by one and held them, then put them in her lap, feeling their cold weight through the thin cloth of her nightdress: his book and his reading glasses, his grandfather’s clockwork watch which didn’t keep time, his greedy eater’s bottle of Gaviscon. His maroon leather slippers, beginning to be brittle from lack of use, were tucked in together neatly down the side of the drawer. She held these against her cheek and smelled the faint leftover odour of his feet, earthy and boggy, with a tang of the eucalyptus he used in the shower.