She couldn’t remember which room she’d been in and the names were no help at all. Had she been in the bedroom? Someone had turned on the oven – the oven was on, it had been on for a long time when she’d first found herself sitting in the door frame, alone. But was she the one who turned the oven on? There was only one of her now. When they’d first talked about it, they’d thought it was a doubling thing. An extra one, hiccuped in from a parallel universe. But the question ‘Which one of us was here first?’ was ridiculous and impossible to answer except with a simple ‘Me’. It wasn’t a doubling, it was a division. They had been divided over two bodies. She had been divided and now they were in one body – perfectly overlapped, so you couldn’t see there were two of them.

Now, in the cold and the dark, the question seemed to be, which one of them was here last? Which one of them was left? And the answer was still ‘Me’.

She lay down on the floor and curled into a shape that was tight, but she could still see the hinges of the door. A pain, a moaning gape, grew deep inside her. It pulled every part of her into it so every part of her just felt loss, reverberated with a low, loud shriek of no. She cried and the crying accelerated into a body shake and her throat was raw. She had trouble breathing, she almost drowned in her tears and snot and still the pain centred just under her ribs drew everything into its emptiness. She hit her face with her fists and then hit the floor with her head. There was none of the relief of denial. There was no phantom limb. She was gone. There was no way of hiding from it in any kind of hope. They hadn’t been that stupid.

From force of habit, when the sun came up, she rang Diane and talked about work and didn’t mention that there was only one of them now. She was under no illusion it was temporary. She wasn’t avoiding it or anything like that. If she told people they wouldn’t want to know, just like they hadn’t wanted to know when it first happened, and she couldn’t handle that. Not right now. But after she’d hung up, she rang Diane back.

‘Hello?’ Diane sounded confused.

‘Also,’ she said. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Who?’ Diane asked.

She thought about it. ‘I’m by myself,’ she said.

‘Where,’ Diane said.

‘I don’t know. Maybe inside me?’

There was silence on the phone for what seemed like a long time.

‘So.’ She said it like she was asking a question.

‘Maybe one of you popped out,’ Diane said. ‘For bread.’

‘We have bread,’ she said.