And the bed itself, back to that. Too small for the room, too big for a woman alone. She longs for her pillows and books, her photo albums and soft toys and cardigans and coats and all the other things that have made their home in her endlessly generous and stalwart queen over the years. How long has it been since she’d spent the night in a different bed? Fifteen years? More. The last one she could remember belonged to a bloke she’d gone out with on and off in the early 2000s. Murray. Yes. He was nice, that man. It hadn’t ended badly or really, when she thinks about it, at all. That is, there had never been a decision to finish whatever it was they were doing. It just hadn’t continued. The eating dinner and sharing a six pack and conversation and then bumping bits together in his bed and waking up in the morning and saying sweet things in embarrassed voices had all been nice. But not nice enough to make an active effort to keep doing it. There had been a last time which she didn’t know was a last time. He just didn’t call for a while and neither did she, and eventually she realised—as he must have, as well—that too much time had passed for a call to be the easy thing it had once been.

There had been a couple of attempts at finding love since then. None went particularly well nor particularly badly. Just never enough feeling to make it worth the trouble. Beds had been rolled about on but not slept in, not all night, since Murray. She didn’t know why. And no men had slept in hers. No men, no anyone, had crossed her doorstep in years.

Until the fall. The uniformed strangers. Lena, crying.