The memories are so painful, but it’s an addictive kind of pain. She can’t help replaying the video clips until her eyes ache from crying. She wishes she could smash the screen and crawl through it. She misses him so much, she feels turned inside out.

Emma calls before she goes to work. Dominica has been expecting to hear from her.

‘It’s snowing,’ Emma says. ‘The kids are so excited.’

Dominica gets up from the desk and looks out of the window to the dark morning, wondering if it’ll start this far south.

‘Chris loved the snow,’ Dominica says and her voice cracks.

‘Oh, babe.’

‘I found some footage. I’ll send it to you,’ Dominica tells her, explaining what she’s been up to since dawn. ‘I’m determined not to be forced into buying more storage. Not on Chris’s birthday. He’d go mental.’

‘I get those messages too. I dream about how there’s someone at the gates of the cloud with a clipboard and I’ll be ticked off for using the Earth’s resources to power a super-computer that’s full of photographs and videos of my children gurning.’

Dominica smiles, thinking of her niece and nephews, and then her heart hurts when she thinks about little Cerys sending a daffodil she made out of tissue paper for Dominica to put on Chris’s coffin and the way her bottom lip trembled when Dominica had thanked her on FaceTime. Those kids adored their uncle. Bard and Owen had loved nothing more than being hitched over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift as he spun them around.

‘I wish I didn’t feel so sad,’ Emma says.

‘I know, darling. Me too. But he wouldn’t want us to …’

‘To dwell. I know.’

There’s a beat as they both accept this.

‘Oh, did I tell you they’ve sent me an email from work? I’ll be going back next month,’ she tells Emma. ‘They’re staggering our return to the office.’

‘That’s great news.’

Is it? Dominica wonders. She wonders how it’ll feel to pick up the old strands of her life at the travel company. She feels nervous about engaging with the customers and her colleagues. She’s asked to go back three days a week, to ease herself in gently, but she knows how all-consuming it can become and how it’ll inevitably spill into the other days.

‘Listen. I’ve got to go. Are you swimming with your friends?’

‘In the snow?’

‘When has that ever stopped you?’ Emma says with a laugh.

Dominica is tempted to go back to bed, but instead, after Emma rings off, she puts a shout-out on the WhatsApp. Emma is right. She needs to do something today to mark Chris’s birthday. Something that would have made him proud. A swim in the snow feels appropriate.

It’s been a skiddy but exhilarating ride here on her bike and Dominica’s breath clouds as she locks it up and surveys the view of the beach. There’s a dusting of snow over everything making the still scene look like a Christmas card, the burnt-out pier standing in sharp relief against the white sky. The sea is a bluish grey – the kind of stylish colour that might grace the walls of a boutique hotel. It’s flat, the waves rippling weakly along the shore, as if they too are conserving energy.