The next time I look at the sun it’s as though someone has placed a sheet of tracing paper over it. The sky is drained of colour as day diffuses into night. I close my eyes. I long for blackness. I long for oblivion. I long for everything. I want to go home. Not Temerosa home, not London even, but the nostalgia and safety of childhood, before the mistakes are made and the dreams are shattered.

‘Benjamín?’ I hear myself croak, and my voice is a tiny person’s voice.

‘Sí, querida’, he answers, and his use of the endearment makes me want to cry again.

‘What are your children called?’

‘Clarita,’ he says. ‘Clarita, Jaime and Rosalita.’

The next time I open my eyes I’m leaning against Benjamín, sort of propped up against his good shoulder. The time after that my head is resting on his legs and his hand is heavy on my hair.

‘M-E and Jack,’ I murmur. Will they ever forgive me? And my cowboy builder? Would he ever know what had happened? Would he understand?

‘That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The blind step in the dark and the freedom to take it.’ I close my eyes and see his face illuminated in the glow of the fire. He lies on his back and watches silently as I undress for him.

Later I stir to find him still watching me.

‘Why aren’t you sleeping?’

‘I was thinking there was a cactus I never showed you,’ he says. ‘And I wanted to show you because it’s absolutely my number one cactus of them all. It’s the Night Flowering Cirrus, or the Midnight Cactus as some people call it, and most of the time it’s just an ordinary unremarkable little plant, but one night a year it blooms and nobody knows why and nobody knows when, but when it does it’s the most heart-stoppingly beautiful thing you ever saw.’

‘What happens to it after that?’

‘It dies.’

‘Bummer.’ I kiss him. ‘So which one of us here is the ordinary unremarkable little plant?’

‘Ah well, maybe both of us.’ He draws his arms around me. ‘Maybe one night like tonight, one extraordinary midnight moment, is the best you can ever hope for.’

‘What if I want more?’

‘Then you have to pay the price.’ He sees my expression and laughs. ‘Hey, didn’t you know,’ he says softly, ‘the only kind of love you can have as a fugitive is a stolen one.’

‘Alice.’ He’s calling my name from very far away. ‘Alice,’ he whispers, closer now.