For the rest of that week, our lives continued. Matthew was gentle with me, quiet. He cooked every night. When I asked how his day had been, he answered in generalities, saying vague things about his patients that made them sound like case studies rather than people – he had patient confidentiality to consider, I knew, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing he said to me was true, that it was all made up. Neither of us mentioned Venice.

*

That Saturday, Matty rose while I was still in bed. I heard him moving around the kitchen and waited to be called through but a few minutes later, he came back into the bedroom with a cup of tea and a plate with a piece of toast. He placed them both next to me and went out again.

I ate, dressed, and when I emerged from the bedroom saw that he had the fridge door open and had taken everything out – it all sat on the kitchen table and he was scrubbing the interior of the fridge. I picked up some of the jars from the table: a very old marmalade that had sugar crystals round the rim, a squat glass tub with a centimetre of mustard. Without saying anything, I ran the hot tap on the kitchen sink and added washing-up liquid. I took the old jars to the bin one by one and used a spoon to scrape out the contents, then put them to soak amongst the bulging suds in the sink.

Later, I went down the stairs with the recycling. I was holding a cardboard box full of the newly washed glass jars, an eggbox squashed flat and a porridge carton folded up. The bin men came on Tuesdays but I put the recycling out at the weekends as I could never remember to do it on a Monday night.

I was coming back into the building when the door to the ground-floor flat opened and Mrs Abaza emerged. She was a sallow-skinned woman with heavily accented English. She turned and propped her door open, using one foot to push a draught excluder in the shape of a sausage dog. Through the door, I got a glimpse of cushions and embroidered throws, a glass cabinet with a lot of figurines.

‘Leeza …’ she said.

‘Mrs Abaza …’ I replied. I was about to get a telling-off about letting the door bang the other night. I wondered if she had seen the police car bring me back.

She looked me up and down in a way I didn’t like. Her cat, the scrawny tortoiseshell she didn’t feed properly, wound itself round the door of her flat, performed a figure of eight around her legs, then sat down next to her and stared up as if it was judging me as well.

‘You know, it is not necessary,’ she said. ‘It is not.’

‘I’m sorry, I was in a hurry, I shouldn’t have.’