The last time she saw him she asked him straight out to let her in. She hated the way it sounded like something from bloody Home and Away but she didn’t know what else to do. Years of hinting and hanging around and hoping hadn’t made a bit of difference. I want to help but I don’t know how, she’d said. They were sitting on the red-brick fence outside of the block of flats he said he lived in. He never let her inside and she didn’t know if it was because he didn’t actually live there or he did and it was too awful to let her see. If you’d just tell me what’s going on with you, she’d said. The TV-soap words brought TV-soap tears. Please, Steve. Let me in.

But she was alone in the scene. He went further inside himself and everything she said after that made more space between them.

There is a new sound breaking through. New and familiar at the same time. Nic concentrates, trying to make sense of its rhythm and pitch. I know this. Too fast to be her heartbeat. Too far outside of her body to be an intensification of the thud in her head.

It stops. Maybe it had never been. It was hard to know, like when she thought the cats were here asking for their breakfast. She’s still not sure if that was real. They weren’t in the room, that much is clear, but were they crying right outside, missing their morning delivery, or were they only crying in her muddled mind? She can’t remember if it happened more than once, if it was at the same time as the light changing outside. Can’t remember anything except the way the sound of them gave her a surge of hope. Such a racket. Someone would notice. And then nothing.

Until the new, maybe not new, noise. A thumping not from inside. Is it still there? Has it always been?

Steve is still here, in her head. She understands why. In those last few years of his life she tried to show him he wasn’t as alone as he felt. But he was, in the end. It was a month before he was found. Imagine that. She wishes she wouldn’t, but she can’t help it. Imagine is the wrong word, implying an act of will: use your imagination. She’s not using anything, not trying, the images come to her: the hours before his death, the moment of, the hours, days, weeks afterwards. The hours before his death were like this, except she has him with her and he had no one.