‘I suppose.’

‘You know what you need?’

‘What?’

‘You need to go on a date with someone else.’

‘How would that solve anything?’

‘It wouldn’t. But it might be fun.’

‘Well, now you mention it, there is my neighbour, Matteo.’ Maddy shakes her head and smiles bashfully. ‘I can’t even believe I’m telling you this.’

‘Matteo?’

‘He’s Luna’s owner. He and I have become, well … friends. But I sense a … I don’t know … a vibe. We’ve been out for coffee twice in the last week and we really get along.’

‘A vibe? That’s good, isn’t it? Maybe you should, you know … make a move.’

‘Seriously? Isn’t he just a distraction? Aren’t I making things more complicated?’

‘Well, you know what they say?’ Tor remembers Alice’s old phrase, from the fun days before Graham. ‘The only way to get over someone is to get under someone else.’

Maddy laughs and Tor raises her eyebrows at her and she laughs even more. ‘Stop it. Stop it,’ she implores.

20

Snow Swim

It’s Chris’s birthday. He would have been sixty. In another universe, where Chris is alive and there’s no Covid, they’d be having the party they’d planned at the hotel. Dominica wonders whether the rugby boys would have clubbed together for the skydive and she imagines Chris receiving the present in his new three-piece suit, his shirt cuffs turned up. She imagines the playlist he would have put together and the song he’d almost certainly whisk her out onto the dance floor to – Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’. She can picture it all; it seems almost tangible. But each detail is a little stab to her heart.

Keen for something to distract her, Dominica starts tackling the iCloud. There have been increasingly frequent messages telling her that she’s out of space and she refuses to pay for more on principle. Chris was always on about big corporations and how they suck you in and then get you by the short and curlies demanding money. What was wrong with printing out photos at Boots? she can remember him saying. Why does everything need to be backed up on a super-computer under the sea? She never asked for that. Who has paperwork that important?

On her computer, she realises that the space has been taken up mainly by videos, and, when she works out the way of accessing them, she’s surprised by the footage that must have automatically uploaded from Chris’s old phone.

She never knew these videos were here and it feels like the best kind of birthday gift. As if Chris is reaching out to her from beyond the grave. Her resentment towards the iCloud quickly morphs into humble gratitude as she trawls through the footage from 2016. It had been the year they’d been on the Honda Goldwing across the States taking the tiny fold-up tent in the panniers. Chris, ever the joker, films himself, the mirth written large across his face as he pulls back the canvas of the tent to wake her up. He was forever pranking her, she remembers.