The kitchen behind him has filled with steam from the boiling pan of water and still he doesn’t turn. It’s like he is waiting for something or afraid to move and break some kind of spell. Good Lord, I think, can he sense me …? All at once, I dare not move either. I begin to wonder if he is actually looking at me. Could it be true, with the mist of steam behind him and the dark night outside, that he is seeing the wavery image of a woman in his glass patio door and is transfixed by it, as I am transfixed by him? I stare and stare and hope and hope … but his gaze goes right through me, towards the back of the garden, and after a long while, I turn.

Eventually, it happens. It begins to appear.

It creeps. It snuffles. It edges its way across the patio from a far corner with a tiny rocking motion. And Andrew stands dead still as if he’s scared of frightening it, watching as a small hedgehog with wrinkled, dark-grey paws and a mobile snout wobbles its way across the speckled concrete slabs, towards whatever combination of dead slug and insect Andrew has put in the bowl, and my heart melts because he fed the hedgehog before he put the water for his own supper on to boil even though he was hungry enough to eat cornflakes. It’s a freezing night, and Andrew fed the hedgehog before he even let himself into the house.

It is then I tumble. Everything about this man – I know it, just from watching him. He is for me and I for him and I feel like I will die if I don’t have him but he will die if I do.

9

The next day, Andrew – as I feel I must call him now, although I still think Caleb suits him better – returns to commuting. He joins the herd. He arrives at the station just after half past seven, walking swiftly in his loose suit up the stairs to Platform Six, where he waits for the Stowmarket train. I wonder where he gets off: Whittlesea, March … Bury St Edmunds? That would be quite a commute. I’m guessing he’s something in accountancy or computing – he strikes me as efficient rather than creative. He’s a polite commuter. He steps back to allow people off the train, gestures to the woman waiting next to him to get on first. Even though there are seats available, he stands in the vestibule between carriages and gets his phone out of his suit pocket and plays something on it, unbothered, which gives me a clue that his commute must be relatively short. The guard slams the doors and Andrew still stands there, for all the world like an ordinary young man on his way to work.