I turn my head and see Duval’s face in the flickering light of the fire. ‘These few months here will become a memory, an amusing story to tell at dinner parties. Your year out in the Wild West.’

Robert grabs me by the shoulder. ‘Alice, it’s okay. Together we’ll get through this. I’m here now, you don’t have to think any more. We must do what’s best for all of us, you, me, the children. You want that, don’t you?’

And when I still can’t answer, it’s his turn to shake me. ‘Don’t you, Alice?’

‘Yes,’ I say mechanically. ‘Of course. What’s best for the children.’

I move around the house, finding passports, opening drawers, folding great piles of clothes into cases without knowing or caring to whom they belong. The children sleep on and I can’t stop thinking . . . What if it’s Benjamín lying in the desert with Robert’s knife inside him? What if it’s Duval? I should have rung Chavez, I should have done something, anything, and I have to call on every ounce of self-control left not to run down the path and along the track towards the schoolroom.

Finally, the packing is done and the hired car loaded. ‘Wake the children,’ Robert says.

Jack is lying on his back, his hand curled protectively around his balls. Emmy is rucked up on her stomach, her mouth open, a circle of damp on the pillow beneath her. I kneel between them and slide Emmy’s hair out of her mouth, then I lay my head on Jack’s chest and inhale his sweet smell, thinking that if I can just breathe deeply enough, maybe a part of him will stay inside me forever.

‘Can I sit in the front?’ Jack asks.

‘Course you can.’

‘Why can’t I sit in the front?’ Emmy says. Jack always gets to sit in the front, it’s so unfair.’

‘Emmy, shhhh,’ Robert soothes, wearied already by the tears, by the exhortations, by the patience and the sheer imagination required to explain to two children why they are being woken at dawn and suddenly, bewilderingly, going home.

Real home. London home, was how Robert kept putting it, and Emmy’s initial wails had turned to joy at the prospect of a reunion with squirrel, rabbit and other lesser members of her Camden High Street stuffed-animal family.

‘No one’s sitting in the front except Mummy,’ Robert says.

‘But Mummy said she didn’t mind,’ Jack says resolutely. ‘And it’s her decision, isn’t it, Daddy?’

‘Mummy can sit in the back with me.’ Emmy sweeps her pink backpack to the floor.

‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ Robert says querulously. ‘As long as Mummy doesn’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind.’ I shake my head, smiling at all of them.

‘Right! Everyone happy now? Can we go? . . . Alice?’

And still I’m smiling.